Voices of the Southern Ocean

VOICES OF THE SOUTHERN OCEAN

A NIPALUNA/HOBART ANTHOLOGY

An initiative of

Made with love and first published in 2024 by Hobartisan Books Level 5, 24 Davey Street Nipaluna/Hobart 7000 hobartisanbooks.com.au

Project team: Georgie Branch, Lucy Christopher, Niki Horin and Elizabeth Leane, with support from the rest of the Nipaluna/Hobart City of Literature Working Group; Cover and internal design: Demelza Rafferty

Each written work in this book is used with permission and remains the copyright © of each individual author named on the page of the work, 2024. Artwork copyright © Annalise Rees, 2024: front cover; back cover, top; pp i, ii–xii, 7, 10, 12, 20–21, 23, 24, 26–27, 28, 32–33, 36, 38-39, 40–41, 45, 46–47, 49, 50.

Artwork copyright © Dean Greeno, 2024: back cover, bottom; pp 42, 51 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any way or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission. Contact Hobartisan Books for permission queries.

This book is printed on Grange Board Tints (Green) and Lessebo (Salt Water) papers. Grange Board Tints is manufactured FSC certified, using pulps sourced from responsibly managed forests, it is acid free and made with elemental chlorine free pulps. Lessebo Paper meets the world’s most stringent environmental requirements with Nordic Ecolabel, FSC and PEFC certifications among others.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

Hobartisan Books pays our respects to the Traditional Owners of the land on which we work in Nipaluna/Hobart, the Muwinina people, who did not survive British colonisation.We acknowledge the Tasmanian Aboriginal community as the continuing custodians of the land, sky and waterways of Lutruwita/Tasmania and pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.

ISBN 978-1-7635427-0-9 (print); ISBN 978-1-7635427-3-0 (eBook)

Printed by Monotone Printers, Nipaluna/Hobart.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This initiative of the Nipaluna/Hobart City of Literature was made possible through the support of three organisations.

College of Arts, Law and Education

Hobart became part of UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network in November 2023, receiving City of Literature status in recognition of the passion and diversity of our local storytellers, and our city’s influential creative sector.

Voices of the Southern Ocean: A Nipaluna/Hobart Anthology is the first project to be delivered under our City of Literature banner, in partnership with key members of the City of Literature Working Group.

The membership of the inaugural Working Group includes City of Hobart, University of Tasmania, TasWriters, Brand Tasmania, Libraries Tasmania, local booksellers and other literature-focussed organisations, and together this group is committed to lifting Hobart’s literary profile even higher.

Voices of the Southern Ocean: A Nipaluna/Hobart Anthology evokes much of what being a City of Literature encompasses, including a commitment to collaboration and to share and inspire through the written word what we are truly passionate about.

Hobart is one of the five global gateways to Antarctica and the Southern Ocean, and our city’s history and future is intrinsically tied to our knowledge and understanding of this special place. With these connections brings a responsibility to ensure its careful management and preservation.

The Southern Ocean is the only place where all the world’s oceans meet. It’s a place not known or visited by many, but is the most significant pumphouse for Earth’s ocean currents and is the biggest sink for absorbing human carbon pollution.

Here within, local voices share their musings on the wild and vast Southern Ocean, the quietly curious inhabitants, and the iciness of the Antarctic continent beyond. We hope as custodians to raise the profile of these important places for the world and to use our Creative Cities Network to spread the word.

These voices care and want those who read their words to respond in kind.

Cr Anna Reynolds Lord Mayor of Hobart

by Prof. Elizabeth Leane

As I write a discussion is underway in Incheon, Republic of Korea, that will have ramifications on the other side of the world. Members of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources – 26 states and the European Union – are meeting to plan their approach to managing krill fishing near the Antarctic Peninsula, in the hope of achieving a long-awaited Marine Protected Area. As this anthology appears, the same group will hold its annual meeting in Hobart, the flags of the member states flying along Macquarie Street as those inside determine the future of the Southern Ocean’s ecosystems.

Incheon, Hobart, the Antarctic Peninsula – the Southern Ocean connects other parts of the globe in surprising ways. Its waters encircle our planet, their northernmost limits meeting the southern reaches of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans. Its Circumpolar Current powers the exchange of heat, nutrients and carbon dioxide with these northern counterparts. Its future is tightly bound to our own.

Until very recently the Southern Ocean’s northern limits – and its very existence – were in dispute. In 2023, members of the International Hydrographic Organization finally approved a resolution to recognise this fifth ocean and fix its northern border at 60 degrees south. However, many of us who study the Southern Ocean or live at the far edges of southern lands believe its waters extend further north and even wash against our shores.

This anthology brings together short responses to the Southern Ocean by writers based in Nipaluna/ Hobart and by those living further afield whose work has engaged with the city or the ocean to its south. Its contributors display a diverse range of styles, genres and viewpoints. What connects them is the Southern Ocean and concern for its (and our) future. In this UN Ocean Decade, we hope that readers – from Hobart to Incheon and everywhere in between – will listen to their collective voices.

Elizabeth Leane Professor of Antarctic Studies

University

of Tasmania

by Jamie Graham-Blair

The Southern Ocean is connected to Palawa and Lutruwita/Tasmania and has been for longer than most can comprehend. Through traditional kinship systems, lore and law, Palawa maintain a deep relationship with the Antarctic. The birthplace of austral winter and global biogeochemical cycles. Palawa family structures and governance systems are different to the majority. Others may see cyatheales, dolerite, winds, glaciers or birds; we see ourselves reflected clearly. We see relations, stories told to us by our elders, entangled branches of the higher “all-life” whole.

Our families are large and extend beyond the human species. One clan I belong to, the trawlwoolway, maintain kinship with many species and cycles but none as strong and unbroken as with yula/Ardenna tenuirostris.

Yula, a wandering icon of the seabird world returns every year to the sandy embrace of offshore Lutruwita islands. Following a path mapped out within their DNA and winds, they travel one of the world’s longest migrations. Nourished and fattened by Antarctic springtime sea-ice melt and the associated productivity explosions, they return to their burrows, lay one egg per cycle, for roughly 40 seasons in a row. A family some 23-million individuals large emboldened by Antarctica’s beating heart and faithful love for their partners. They gift us omega-3 rich oils for our aches, sustenance for the colder months, bones for crafting, and feathers for our bedding. In reciprocity we maintain their islands with fire, ceremony and strict management laws.

Once they complete their rearing, the parents leave on their never-ending journey, and the young follow when they are ready. Once all the chicks have left but before the winter’s harsh weather, Palawa travel to these islands and burn back the thick tussock grass and shrubland. We hold back the colonisation of woody, thick scrub, with its compacted soils, so that yula can easily dig their burrows and persevere with their responsibilities. This place where flame meets feather, meets sand, meets seed, meets salt, is the place where we have been bound by ecological law for longer than most can comprehend. Yet, it is just one example.

Of eternal family.

Of kinship.

Of governance systems birthed from reciprocity.

Of sovereignty.

Of custodianship.

Of ancient connections to the Antarctic.

To acknowledge our ancestors and the depths of their connection to our planet is to see them, but to feel and understand their stories and relationships, to embody their ecological position is to become them.

Jamie Graham-Blair

Jamie “Jam”is a trawlwoolway and plangermaireenner ethnoecologist who works in Nipaluna/Hobart studying seabirds, plastic impacts, biocultural restoration, machine learning, climate change and decolonisation.

V O I C E S

KIM BAMBROOK

Kim is a poet and author of Undertow. She is currently writing her first children’s book. Kim lives in Hobart and ocean swims year-round.

Hard south

Winter sharpens lines cold air snaps frozen anything that lingers too long, in one place

Shallow breaths wide eyes the wonder of it all

Crystal glass clarity despite the sun not yet risen

Grains of sand appear magnified each adhering to the next

My bare feet cut craters to the water line

Tighten the goggles shake out the arms in breath, out breath calm

One big puff in I dive the effect is immediate pain a delicious, addictive pain quickly forgotten as arm over arm progress is made leaving behind the shore reaching for what is beyond

Below me, a kelp bed fishes dart an eagle ray rises with a dancer’s grace slides away bubbles pop, richness explodes

I’ve swam in lots of places most recently, the Med blue sea, warm water one can see the appeal

It’s here though in my home in Hobart where swimming brings me most joy

Here, the waters are infinitely rich here, I look to the horizon know that the next land mass is Antarctica know that between here and there the Southern Ocean is alive

Beating, pulsing, moody wild in my own wild heart it is here, I am most me

ALYSSA BERMUDEZ

Alyssa is a New Yorker living in Tasmania, creating vibrant illustrations and graphic novels. Her work celebrates inclusivity and represents diverse backgrounds.

MEG BIGNELL

Meg is the author of four books, three cabaret shows and three short films. She lives on a dairy farm on Tasmania’s south-east coast.

The Investigator

Nearly every day I walk past the home port of a giant blue and white boat named RV Investigator. She is the vessel of a crew of superheroes working to save the world. When the Investigator’s in port, I whisper thanks and wish her solid rest. When she’s out (or as the superheroes say, when she’s “underway”), I send my wish over the water, and wonder whether she’s found another lost shipwreck, or is testing more of that phytoplankton which affects the brightness of clouds in the sky.

I wonder if she’s ventured south of the 60th parallel, where all the superpowers really have to shape up because it can get as hectic as hell down there. I know because I’ve felt it in the whip-ass southerly that sends frozen rain into the shoes by my back door. I know because I’m Tasmanian, and I’ve seen variations of cold, but not that deathly sort of Southern Ocean cold, and I don’t ever want to go there. I am no superhero.

But down there is the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which is the greatest superpower of all because it’s absorbed much of global warming’s errant heat. And it’s in trouble. Affected by meltwater and starting to falter, it needs our superheroes to search for ways to plug the leaks. They have stuff like advanced radar, multibeam echo-sounders and deep-water robots; so, yep, they are our best chance. When they’re not on their extraordinary Investigator, many of the superheroes spend their days thinking and planning in their headquarters at the CSIRO, which, no matter what anyone tells you, is code for Clever Superheroes Implementing Rescue Operations.

Carmel spent her first 23 years in Tasmania and now lives in Victoria. She has published many novels and collections of stories. Visit carmelbird.com

Pictures in the pavement

In Ancient Rome, even before the birth of Julius Caesar, artists used to compose pictures on pathways and floors using tiny shapes of coloured stone. These stones were known as “tessellae”. Long before all that – in fact, 300 million years earlier – in the Southern Ocean, the waters and salts and sands of the sea formed from sedimentary rock, a patterned pavement on the shoreline of a place now known, in the 21st century of modern times, as Eaglehawk Neck in Lutruwita/Tasmania.

It was at a time of prosperity and peace, following a time of global war, in the middle of the 20th century, that a child (it was me) hopped barefoot from a summer holiday caravan onto the rocks above the shore at Eaglehawk Neck and looked down as the ocean tide receded. Instead of a sandy beach, the child saw, spread out below, a dark brown pavement of large smooth flat wet chunks of rock. “Oh,” she said, “that looks like a huge block of chocolate down there.”

And so it did, and so it does, and so, to this very day, a visitor may gaze in wonder at the tessellated pavement, as the white suds of the Southern Ocean wash over it. They breathe the salty air, and look up to the windy sky – and maybe break off a square from a tessellated block of dark chocolate, and pop it in their mouth, crunch it with their back teeth, and let it slowly dissolve on their tongue.

CHRISTINA BOOTH

Christina is an award-winning author and illustrator, who loves watching and drawing the Southern Ocean whales who spend their winters near her home in Nipaluna. Visit christinabooth.com

Song of the ocean

Deep, the heaving heart. Steady, wild, lashing bouldered shores. Rising. Crashing. Manes of salt and foam gathered, sculpted in the roar of winds. Defiant. Protective. Reticent. The hidden heart.

Giants sing their stories, sailing to the north-bound winter.

Abundant life shelters beneath the grey steel ebb. Heart. Wheeling wings ride the drifts, eyeing feasts of silver darts. Beat.

Sleek, fast, breaking through the angry façade, diving, rising.

Cumbersome creatures, heavy upon the shore, thrust through dark swelling waters. Dancing. Turning. Free.

A breath of spray forces against the current. Breathe out. Breathe in.

A fluke, white, grey, slaps against the rising swell. Rolling. Diving.

A curve of gleaming black cuts the waves, slips deep into an indigo realm. When night makes waters dark, a glow of colour across the sky, spirited lights shine upon firework spray.

A deep, dark, ice cathedral, creaking, standing sentry, reaching high toward the stars, touches a midnight sky.

The song of the ocean, subtle not, pushing against the wind. Dancing. Turning. Free.

Forever, the heaving heart.

KAREN BROOKS

Karen lives in Hobart and loves whales, penguins and dolphins. She has a PhD in literature and cultural studies and writes best-selling historical fiction.

Whale watch

The engines fell silent. The boat bobbed and rolled, a lonely cork in a vast wine-dark ocean. Waves struck the sides, softly at first, transforming into aggressive slaps. Wind whipped the glacial sea-spray against the row of heads turned eagerly towards the horizon. Sky and sea enveloped us, melding into a cerulean palette upon which we were a metal and fumes blight. Somewhere deep below, cruised the denizens we’d come to watch. Only, in a contrary gesture (or perhaps it was stage fright), they refused to make an appearance.

Cameras were primed, mobiles too, lenses searching for the tell-tale pillar of noisesome mist – whale-breath – the sign we were not alone.

Then, I felt it.

Looking down, I gazed into the waters churning against the hull just as a cry went up and jubilant fingers pointed into the distance. As cameras snapped and video whirred, exclamations accompanying the jostling and joy, a huge, dark eye, separated by mere inches of swirling brine, latched onto mine.

I forgot to breathe.

Eons passed. There beside our diminutive craft, its barnacled flesh on bold display, replete with scars and rents, drifted a Southern Right Whale.

Hush, it seemed to say, don’t reveal me. Yet.

I swear, the eye twinkled – it was nothing to do with the medium; it was the message.

I see you, it said. Don’t simply watch: see me.

Heart pumping, I quietly did. All while its family playfully cavorted and mine, oblivious to what floated beneath, clicked and clacked.

BOB BROWN

Bob is an author and activist who rose to prominence in the campaign to save the Franklin River before serving 26 years in state and federal parliaments. He led the Australian Greens and established the Bob Brown Foundation.

The Southern Ocean

The sun and Earth feed the phytoplankton that feed the krill that feed the fish, whales, penguins, seals and albatrosses, that feed carbon back into the ocean and oxygen into the atmosphere and keep the great current of the Southern Ocean circling Antarctica. That current feeds stability to Earth’s climate as well as nutrients to all the oceans as far as the North Atlantic. Endlessly. Miraculously. Through all human times.

All life on Earth is buoyed by the Southern Ocean, and will be for as long as we may live.

We cannot show whether there is some greater intelligence than ours behind this reality or whether it is an astonishing long-shot in a cosmos of imponderable possibilities, but we do know that the Southern Ocean is the fount of everyone on Earth’s existential wellbeing.

Nevertheless, this unique fount is being plundered by the fifth generation of human pirates who have clubbed the seals, herded the penguins into cauldrons, harpooned the whales, long-lined the icefish and are now vacuuming up the krill for industrial fish farms for us.

Meantime, the current circling Antarctica, driving Earth’s living wellbeing, has slowed 30 per cent in our lifetime. But what about when it stops? Because, as the Southern Ocean lives or dies, so do we.

CAHILL

Michelle is a novelist and poet, winner of the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing and the 2023 Hedberg Writer-in-Residence.

Kelpers

As if the reef swells mandate, having read tides, wind and moon, they tear through darkness across gravel and sodden fields park their trailer by boulders in harsh wind, in hammering seas sawing off sinewy limbs, debris of the spent bones and marrow. Lumberjacks of the sea’s forests, hook the muscular bull kelp. The stars are burning steadfast, a beam pulses from the lighthouse blinding in its rotational symmetry as they work the slippery rocks wading, lithe as a night heron. The gamble could pay if they winch a full cache to wither on the racks, before the sweet smell of decay. A pile of leftover stems glistens yellow as jaundice, elderberry brown, an oddity for the beachcomber. And for days and days, you may hear windchimes, a siren jangle of leathery strings let to hang dry.

LUCY CHRISTOPHER

Lucy is an internationally best-selling, award-winning writer for young people and adults. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Tasmania and would love to meet an albatross.

Huge, dark depths

It is night, yawning and tar-black. My weeks-old child sleeps against me, her tiny body warm while rain is relentless on the roof. This winter water comes and comes, rushing from the mountain towards the estuary where it will flow towards a huge, very deep, ocean I know little about.

On my phone, illuminating us in blue glow, an article from New Scientist. The subconscious is still the last psychological frontier. Ridiculous, really, how little we understand of it. How deep it may go. How much it may influence. A whole cavernous ocean inside us.

With phone-glow I study my daughter’s face. I find little of myself. So little, I had even asked the doctor if she’d birthed the right baby. My daughter. Still such a foreign phrase; something apart and a part of me. I breathe in her unknown, her strange surface already so essential. Will she stay below this mountain, at the edge of this ocean?

I’ve read that this ocean is so deep that 17 Empire State Buildings could be stacked up inside it and not break the surface. I’ve read it has the biggest mammals and the coldest waters in the world. But what do I know really, of how it influences and tempers our climate? Could I explain how crucial it is to us all?

I swipe off the phone.

Tonight, I am surrounded and sustained by these huge dark depths; the most precious, essential things, all so foreign and so unfathomably close to me.

Cally is the inaugural Fullers Bookshop Afterword Café Poet Laureate. Cally lives by the sea.

The Hippolyte Rocks

The weight of water passing through my hands with every stroke. A fleeting glimpse of sky with every roll. How water understands the need to part. Other laws apply.

Anything can happen. Land is lost. Mutter and moan, the sea is open-mouthed, a deep green swell conceals an albatross gliding on time, known by the flow and loved.

They’ll be here soon, the horses, once they’ve bolted to ride the element of everywhere. The horses! Here they come! The mind is altered by angels breaking reins in whelms of air, re-created in the wind-bent waves.

I have met the horses face to face.

YOUNG DAWKINS

Young lives and writes in Nipaluna. He believes the Southern Ocean belongs to the whales.

The seventh sea

Soft autumn days turn fast in Tasmania; tempestuous winds, scuttering clouds and now our yellow tour boat is rolling in the lee of old rounded rocks and limestone blocks behind the Iron Pot light.

Storm Bay has come up ugly, whitecaps whipped into sheets of frigid spray. Our skipper says we’ll run across to Bruny, be calmer over there, powers up the twin outboards and we are instantly heaved into stinging wet violence; our young son squeals in horrified delight as a wave breaks completely over the cabin.

The air screams louder than the labouring engines. We are so small and the quarter hour seems longer until finally the far shore and back to Constitution Dock.

Six score nautical miles southwest, the Precambrian teeth of the Breakseas chew on 12-metre swells and spit spume across Bathurst Channel. The Big Water rolls her shoulders and the end of our island shudders.

We are all at sea.

SARAH DAY

Sarah’s latest collection is SlackTide(Pitt Street Poetry, 2022). Her previous books have won or were shortlisted for various premiers awards. She is an active member of Marion Bay Coastcare.

Nothing is more revealing of Lutruwita/Tasmania’s isolation from the greater part of the human population than a plane trip from the northern hemisphere to Hobart, a small city on the southern tip of a small triangular island in the Southern Ocean. The metropolitan centres of Europe, the Middle East, Pakistan, India, Thailand, Singapore, fall gradually away. The astonishing global mesh of flight paths teases out somewhere south of Indonesia regrouping briefly around the Australian continent’s major cities. For me, one of the great joys of going elsewhere is the deep psychological pleasure of the return – to this remote outpost beyond which there is wide, wild ocean and then the Antarctic continent.

What is so enticing about being on the edge of things, about being on the human and geographic periphery around which three of the great oceans of the world converge? Peripheries can allow for perspective on what’s beyond us, can give a freedom, especially the freedom to think, for me this comes with a sense of being a small part of everything, universally. The coast, the oceans, connect us with the main – the other oceans and seas of the world. In the ancient forests, the mountains, and on the plateau, where time and space bend we become part of a fabric that both includes and is wider than humanity. Should we need reminders, being away from this island reinforces the urgency of protecting its rarities.

Madeleine lives in Hobart, with a view across the Derwent towards the ocean. She is the 2024 BookPeople Young Bookseller of the Year.

Sea glass

As the scar heals I take to the water. Exposed red flesh meets the tenderness of wave and sand and salt and weed, the cold reality of the sea.

This shell of skin, this whorled body contains the ageing bones of an older woman, its calcification already set in.

The northern soil of my grandparents is a deep rusted red. Ancient sea volcanoes burnt out to a wet, red silt that stays stuck under my fingernails for months.

Try as I might to be rid of it not even steel wool will scrub the skin clean without a little blood in the sink.

In the south I unearth the oyster shells and periwinkles buried by my mother’s father among the apricot pips and the blue bread tags and the old, browning bones.

A small incision at the base of the spine reveals the bloody mess beneath, the tessellated vertebrae meeting in an uneven tension.

Children, I’m told, will be more painful than this.

So swim. Let the cold and the salt work. Give in, I think they say. And still I don’t know whether to calm the hot bloody ocean within, or let the wine-dark water take me.

Emily is a Palawa writer and academic from Lutruwita. She has a soft spot for Antarctic pearlwort. Her fiction has appeared in Islandmagazine.

Fitzrovia kanikung

The sea is filthy grey. The off-white caps, rendered in heavy strokes, are unnaturally even. The tableau has a pallid tint that conjures thoughts of smog. Around the image is a halo of miniature globes. She counts 30. Glowing indistinctly in the afternoon sun, their allure is somehow not diminished by the spiked fence that guards the stairwell below.

Above the picture, in bold white font against scabby black, she reads “Bourne & Hollingsworth Bar”. The composition is ludicrous, but she is covered in sweat and sick of looking at the pink garbage bags and dismembered boxes heaped on the footpath under signs that read “fitness lab”, “tu manges”, “bike + bean”. She allows her legs to take her down into the close darkness of the basement bar, orders a gin and lets her eyes adjust.

A man and woman are seated on a low stage facing each other. They are reading in unison from the same text. In harmony, then not. His voice trailing away, interrupting, adding in detail, throwing in jest. Hers chasing him back. His voice dulls; hers cycles on, louder, pedalling forward. Their eye contact shifts and weaves with the writing. His bright sneaker agitating softly beneath his seat while she pushes her glasses back.

The young woman lifts the glass to her mouth as their voices wash over her. She closes her eyes and concentrates on the sympathetic clink of ice. There is a heaviness in her brain and a pain weaving itself behind her left eye. She crunches down on an ice cube. Imagining rosemary. Imagining juniper. Her feet are in the sand. Her calves lashed red by the spiky grass. Freezing air is curling in under her jaw. Looking out, she sees two women submerged in the waves. One in a black cap. One without. Both making interminably slow strokes against the surface of the sea. At the water’s edge now, the frigid water snatches at her toes. Behind her, on the face of the dunes, the kanikung is thriving in the June chill. She is lovelorn for its fruit.

Zowie’s writing has won the Scribe Nonfiction Prize and the Ultimo Prize. She is the previous editor of Voiceworksand currently edits for Mascara

Shell

Somewhere a shell is missing its mussel, the mosaic of a shelter left curled around itself. It leaves a shattered trace – a clean record-groove, texture of bruised fingernail.

“Oyster dredging was so successful that by 1860 exports of the shellfish contributed more to the economy than any other primary industry”, reads the Companion to Tasmanian History. And “they say” it’s the ocean you can hear when you cup your ear against a shell – others say that’s your heartbeat; or maybe the ocean happens to be your heart, circulating oxygen and music to your extremities. Some of these shells are older than the buildings here.

And then someone said, “did you know that sharks are older than the stars,” because in fact, the elasmobranch family evolved before trees or even flowers. Today, the music video to the song Baby Shark has been viewed more than any other on YouTube – 14 billion times – so many, in fact, that every human on the planet could have seen it more than once. When I worked as a nanny the two-year-olds would cry and cry until I played the song, first in English and then in Spanish, bouncing on the bed as all the shark family members introduced themselves. And I wonder if it’s true that “one out of every three times you go for a swim in the ocean, you’re being watched by a shark?” And I wonder if there are more ancient eyes watching as the casings of our lives outlast us.

Rae is an internationally renowned writer of YA fiction and nonfiction, based in Nipaluna/Hobart. Rae would like to be reincarnated as an anglerfish.

The diver’s nemesis

“You know why you’re useless with women? Because you spent most of your 20s wooing molluscs.”

I have nothing in common with the crumbling abalone diver. But mutual bewilderment and antipathy can be simplified to something playful. I hunt for common ground.

“Tell me about the ocean.”

A tidal shift. A wave of wistfulness and fascination smooths a face that has sat in Royal Hobart’s hyperbaric chamber more than once. Medical emergencies and exaggerated killers – I always start with sharks, and the bends. Us landlubbers are sensationalists by nature: teeth, risk and danger first. I’ve heard it before, but I want to hear it again.

The huge belly of the fish had drifted above him, the whitest white he’d ever seen. The wonders continue unabated. The cowfish in the kelp, the handfish in Bathurst Harbour, the whale and her calf.

Swimming next to a new mother and looking her straight in the eye, an eye that transmitted something that both species understood. He declares a universal admiration for all but one.

“BLOODY OCTOPUS. They follow you around, waiting for your net to be full. Then with just one tentacle they remove your oxygen mask. And while you’re struggling for air – they steal your catch. Clever BASTARDS.”

The diver surfaces from his stories. He has a sadness about him. You never get over the Southern Ocean and you miss every part of her – even the thieves who make men fools.

ADRIENNE EBERHARD

Adrienne loves seeing albatross on the ocean south of Tasmania. Her sixth collection of poetry will be published in Paris, in 2025.

Southern Ocean

i.

south of here ocean pours and shifts veneer wrinkled puckered sheer as thin silk pinch and pull of waves all lace cuffs world struck silver insistent soft louche languorous its lick and retreat on constant repeat building to heavy brocade belling deep-clang detonating unyielding filling flood of fabric until e v e r y where is froth and foam surge and spray of sea blown to constant motion tumult of waves breaking curling like cavalry horses pawing defiant spark of silver the gleam of stirrups steep crests sliding spume spraying like steam and further out the steady spread of hills cloaked in jet-black rising steep and shadowed until they are mountains looming lines of them lifting to the horizon’s crenellated ridge lumpy with howl-hammer-heft and shriek of solar winds ii.

sea’s a choppy broth of blue waves peaking in white froth surging sudsy and all around mutton birds churn turn and dart whirling black stabs sharp pencil marks etching the sky thousands of bodies sheering close to the surface veering amongst them albatross cruise suspended long white kites edged with black wings gentle scythes tipped dipping to trace the water their unhurried flight mesmerising silent ohm in the ocean’s thrum

Liz is a writer, author and academic from the UK living in Tasmania, who finds the Southern Ocean daunting, mesmerising, exhilarating and familiar. Her debut novel is CatherineWheel(Ultimo Press, 2024).

selkie; selky, seilkie, sejlki, silkie,  silkey, saelkie, sylkie

On Lunawuni, the neck calls you. That skinny strip of sand, where you never see a fairy penguin but never stop searching for one.

Look to your right, and it’s all swans and lagoons and calm, still water, clear as can be, the sun dancing on the surface, like nobody’s watching. Cast your eyes across the bay and up the hill when summer fades, and you’ll see Vikki’s she-oak, flaring bright. A tiny star on the green.

But look to your left, and your breath … well. You’ll be catching it. All that rushing and gusting and rolling and crashing. All that boiling sea. Enough to stop your heart.

This is where the whales come, daring themselves back after centuries of hunting, to nurse their calves in the shallows. You spotted a pair once, a few metres out, their breath spraying the sky, their tails pounding the waves. A moment that refused words, altering you instead, with a trace. An echo that bled through your nights, beckoning to you.

So now, you greet the tide like a lover. Full pelt to the edge, arms aloft, face soft, eyes closed. Yielding to the tug in your bones, the sting in the air, the beat of the moon. Melting down beneath your skin.

The effort of peeling. The pain of resistance. And, finally, the shedding.

A puddle of flesh on the shore. A dark grey head, bobbing, on the horizon. The trail of longing in your wake.

Lily is a writer and reader based in Southern Tasmania. She likes stories about love and magic, and works at Libraries Tasmania.

Cauldron

Once, we imagined the ocean and saw monsters. Mermaids. Tall ships and secret islands and behemoths in the deep.

It was seduction, promise, death.

Birthplace of gods, lure of men. Aphrodite rising from the waves.

Riches. Adventure. Doom.

Children in sailor costumes, with small wooden boats. Men hunting their fortune in its roiling, crashing mass. A fortune of new maps, dead whales, conquest, superstitions whispered in the dark. Blood in the water.

The ocean was executioner and life-giver, pulling bodies into the deep and offering up shining fish, thick kelp, sharp shellfish and lustrous, delicate pearls.

Hear the old stories and the ocean is the cauldron of life – goddesses fling their sliced-up husbands into the waves, children rise through the foam, sea-beasts shape the coastline.

Dive into the archives, and maps of our ocean are fantasy. Grandfatherly clouds blow curling gusts of wind. Monsters undulate over the waves. Topless mermaids beckon from rocks.

Where is that ocean now?

Sea levels rise, fantasy-bright coral turns white, species vanish. Steel giants of science and industry crash through the waves and the ice. Once we feared it, now we fear what we will do to it.

Will the ocean still hunt us if we keep its waters free of plastic, of pests, of bodies?

No longer threatening – our ocean is threatened. Our maps are stale – blue ink and black lines. Where did the magic go?

Tony is an international award-winning illustrator of over 50 books. With a passion for children’s publishing, he has worked on projects from picture books to graphic novels.

Interception – a true story

In the inky blackness of the night, the clouds moved around us like a roiling curtain. The team leader calls “Weapons locked and loaded”. It is me and six from the special operation group. We jump down into an aggressive-looking Zodiac boat. The light at the end of the Pirate Bay jetty casts harsh shadows across the scene.

The Zodiac surged away from the safety of the bay and out into deep water. “We are two nautical miles from the target”, shouted the captain over the rushing wind. He shuts off the lights to allow a covert approach. The waves slap the bottom of the boat, and the darkness engulfs us. As my eyes adjust, I can feel the water spray my face, the salt on my lips and up my nostrils.

Ahead, a speck of light that blinks. Fighting the growing waves, the Zodiac churned eddies into the surface of the Southern Ocean. The light ahead blinks as our target dips and rises from behind the waves.

With a surge of power, our hull slams into the side of the yacht. From behind me, I hear “Armed Police and Customs everybody down” as the officer jumps the gunnel rail of the yacht.

I reach for the rail, one hand pressed against the hull of the yacht for balance. I lift my foot just as the Zodiac drops, and the hull shoots up as the power of the ocean pushes us apart. I start to fall; oh shit!

NICOLE GILL

Nicole is a Tasmanian conservation detection dog handler and award-winning author, who writes on nature, humans and other animals for readers of all ages.

Sea elephant gentleman seeks Southern Ocean beauties for temperate adventures

Born on the shores of Turrakana in south-east Lutruwita, I am an energetic aspiring beachmaster who seeks adventurous Mirounga leonina lasses to help me retake our ancestral shorelines.

While I am not yet of age, I have what it takes to helm a harmonious harem. Already, I have earnt the respect of the local human populace through both my regular vanquishment of any traffic cones that enter my domain, and my occasional blockading of local roads and other critical infrastructure. All bow to my increasingly massive girth! They fete me as a king, and I have a coterie of servants who wait on me day and night.

Although I live far from the main colonies, please do not imagine me an uncultured fellow. I sport the latest seasonal technology fashions, and my oceanic expeditions are followed by teams of scientists who hang on my every move, to say nothing of my thousands of fans on what my servants refer to as “the Clock App” and “the Gram”. Come dive with me through the magical mesopelagic, and marvel at my hunting prowess as we cruise the Southern Ocean, relishing the delicate pulses of terrified squid rippling through our vibrissae, crunching the tenderest icefish morsels between our teeth!

Haul out with me, and I promise you need never fear your pups being crushed by careless rivals! I rule these beaches unchallenged; my lounging territories are abundant, with ample beaches, coastal dunes, roads and driveways in which a lady might rest and enjoy her annual catastrophic moult.

If you feel moved to entwine your future with mine, tarry no longer. Hurry to join me on Lutruwita’s spacious south-east coast – adventure awaits!

N.T.S.

SUSIE GREENHILL

Susie writes and sails on the edge of the Southern Ocean. Her novel, The Clinking, an ecological love-story, will be published by Hachette in March 2025.

somewhere beyond, before this salt-water horizon, a silver ocean ends and begins. here taluna flows into a confluence of timtumili minanya, the northern periphery of the southern ocean, and the edges of the tasman sea. its dark, tannin waters float above the denser, colder salt; an inter-leaving of river and ocean that alters with the tides, with the rain. between these layers, there is a vertical mixing of nutrients, of algae, a dispersal of molecules, a language of plankton, salinity and light. here in the liquid amber reefs the sunlight is filtered, dimmed. red algae, deep-water sponges and orange corals bloom in the dark. the ocean ebbs beneath the brackish water, cold and clear. in mid-winter the estuary is wine-dark ink. oceanic gales scour the seabed of urchins and kelp. ghost forests, skeletal limbs of trees drift, entangled on the swell. the oily foam of the silk-skinned river shivers on the surface of the waves.

we swim through days where the shallows are green as glass, rich with chlorophyll, milky with salps. warm, cerulean currents from the north bring seasons of jellyfish. the diaphanous fins of tropical fish flicker off the deep-water reef. there are patterns of rain, nutrients and heat that stain the tides opaque and red, and by night, blooms of bioluminescent plankton glow blue with shimmering light. this elegy, this polewards migration of life, written in the colour of the water. a story already in motion here in this warming, acidifying bay. above the river’s mouth, the atmospheric waves of nuyina, aurora, break and circle. the ocean an opalescent mirror, smooth as abalone pearl.

the sea indivisible from the sky, the sky from sea.

DR CAMERON HINDRUM

Cameron writes novels, plays and poetry. His Norwegian grandfather jumped ship in Hobart in 1915, walked to Dunalley and carved out a living as a fisherman.

The vast ocean is finally calm.

Peter braces his back against the mast, eyes squinted into the squall, cupping solid hands around the fragile flame of the match and trying to hold it, while the ocean heaves, against the bowl of his pipe. He is used to the rhythm of the water now, the roll and sway of the barque. Other than the Southern Ocean, he has no idea of his location and a bare understanding of his destination. A war rages out there, somewhere. Invisible empires are dying. There is nothing behind him but water, and nothing ahead: the world is gone.

It was not always so smooth: Peter is no stranger to violent water, but there was little sleep; instead bracing his solid upper body against the staunches of his narrow bunk to keep from being cast onto the floor. A lesser vessel would not have made it: each wave an impenetrable wall, punching hard against taut timber, each blow felt in the muscles and fear of the ragged sailors trying to find anything at all in the turmoil and violent pitching that might pass as rest. It had lasted several days and nights. His pipe somehow lit, Peter draws in calming smoke and releases it over the water, where it vanishes immediately. He has vanished too, turning his back on a job with the railways in southern Norway to chance his fortune as a sailor. The letter from his mother is folded neatly, permanently, in his hip pocket, its last line caught in his memory, a reluctant fish: Jeg håper ikke havet vil splitte oss for alltid.

I hope the ocean will not separate us forever.

ERIN HORTLE

Erin is a Tasmanian-based writer and surfer. Her debut novel, TheOctopusandI , and forthcoming novel, A CatalogueofLove , are Southern Ocean-facing works.

Water birth

I wouldn’t birth my daughter in the Tasmanian surf but I would labour there, holding my shared body open to bay and Southern Ocean beyond.

A wave crashed in front of me. White sprayed across blue sky and I sank down into green as a contraction took me: pain ratcheted me tight while cool, aerated water fizzed against my taut belly. Then it passed, and my lips opened to the calming surface.

This synchronous rhythm of pain and surf thrilled me. That I was capable of being thrilled was a sign I still had time; time to haul my distended body out of the water and up to hospital, where I knew from experience the temperature of the birthing bath would be monitored closely by the midwives to blend with my body temperature and ease my baby’s transition from utero to outside world.

But the ferocity of my next contractions told me that the surf was no longer an ideal theatre for my pain: too rough for me; too cold for her. *

Months later, I cold-water swam my way out of post-natal depression. I thanked the shock of wintry salt for jarring me back into my body, every day. My daughter was bundled up warm in the pram, snoozing while I searched for myself in immersion, in sensation. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Southern Ocean, the water wasn’t cold enough for a whole generation of emperor penguin chicks who sank into the depths, while their parents watched on, unable to help.

ARIANNE JAMES

Arianne lives in Hobart and grew up by the sea. She loves mermaids and to beachcomb. She is writing her second novel and hosts Thebookshelf on Edge Radio.

The sealskin

From the cradle Tasmanian children are warned about the ocean’s dangers. We’re told of rips and rogue waves. We’re told not to struggle if a current catches us, to flow with it to calmer waters. Children who live by the sea learn the language of the tides. Spring tide, neap tide, king tide, high. Low tide brings treasures. It’s an unusual house without an assortment of sea glass and shells, crab claws and driftwood on windowsills.

The best thing I ever found was a sealskin.

My mother told me stories, before she died, of selkies. Some seals were just seals, but others had people sleeping inside. The pelt was grey and slick, as if its owner had only recently slipped out. Cool and velvety to touch, I wanted so badly for it to belong to my mother. To believe that instead of heaven, she’d gone to the sea.

I waited by the shoreline until the sun sank into dusk and the stars winked. I waited, but she did not come. I looked at the skin. Had she left it so I might follow?

With both hands I lifted the heavy thing, over my head and back, but it would not stick, slipping from my narrow shoulders to pool at my feet like old curtains. It said the sea wasn’t for me.

Now, when I listen to the waves hush their lullabies, I imagine it’s my seal-mother singing to me. Wrapped inside the ocean’s arms, she’s safe, and whole, and waiting.

Katherine is a Hobart-based science writer and novelist who loves wild places. She has been published in Good Weekend,FortySouth,Islandand TheConversation.

Swimming among giants

On one of my first trips to Tasmania, in 1993, I went scuba diving with my now husband in a giant kelp forest in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, south of Hobart. We backflipped off a wooden boat my father-in-law built. The cold water was clear, a shadowy gum-green.

We finned our way through a forest of giant kelp, gold fronded, sturdy stalked. The gas-filled balls at the base of each leaf-like streamer are called pneumatocysts. Pneum as in lungs. My partner is a marine ecologist, and kelp is his specialty. The buoyant structures that pop underfoot when washed up on a beach help the kelp reach the light so it can photosynthesise. And that it does. Giant kelp can grow 30 metres tall at a rate of up to half a metre a day.

The result is a three-dimensional ecosystem, supporting life forms found only in southern Australia. Think leafy seadragons. On the seafloor, around the kelp’s rock-solid holdfasts, roam abalone and rock lobster.

Fast-forward 30 years, and our son brings friends from Melbourne and we try to find a strand or two of giant kelp, but the underwater forests have declined dramatically along Australia’s south-east. In Tasmania, less than five per cent remain. Climate change has seen warm, nutrient-poor waters extend south – hitching a ride, the invasive long-spined sea urchin, which grazes on kelp.

Gail is a novelist and former academic. Her tenth novel, One Another , was written during the 2022 Hedberg Writer-in-Residence program.

Calenture

Early sailors, made vulnerable by long sea voyages in which they spent months without sighting land, occasionally succumbed to a peculiar form of delusion – calenture – in which they believed the ocean to be a lustrous, rolling field. They so desired stability and earth beneath their feet that they would fling themselves overboard in ecstatic delirium. This was a pathology, a confusion of haptic and psychic lives. But it was also regarded as an experience of the fabulous, and often described in tones of awe and wonderment, as if what was being enacted was a kind of irresistible return, sometimes to the maternal.

Wordsworth wrote in 1820 of the ocean as a “breast” and a “couch” in which one sank into “the depth of limpid floods.” Melville, in Moby Dick (1851) described calenture as the product of a “mystic mood”: “fact and fancy … interpenetrate and form a seamless whole.”

So let’s revisit this word. Let’s consider it not about death or wild-flinging madness, but envisioning the ocean as a congenial, inviting space, one in which imagination is intensified and profoundly lives. In offing, in wave-rhythm, and above all in submersion, are lovely, dreamlike, dimensionless apparitions. The underwater, the anti-terrestrial, offers relief to the familiar. It is a visionary other-life. It is an alternative aesthetics. Underwater, one might metaphorically dissolve and see anew, be taken by the soft, vast force of another element, down, deep down, into a second sensorium.

KRUIMINK

Kate is a writer from Lutruwita. Her latest novel is Heartsease (Picador). She loves the sea cliffs above the Southern Ocean at Cape Hauy.

The melting of the ice caps

Water will unmake your beds, loose your curtains into slow drifts of heavy grace. Fish will cast their shadows over your towns, bright bodies flashing birdlike above,

billowed in immortal krill who grow old and then young among the sediment of your days, the gravel, soil, sequins, tea leaves, spices, the hair of your cats and your dogs. Pencils floating from the windows of the schools.

Your tallest spires will bend in the refracted light. Bubbles will loosen from hidden corners.

The sky will be pushed higher. Your goldfish will rejoice, but your caged birds will suffer.

You will float, and then you will sink, and you will rest in the waving grasses, or the branches of the trees, or catch on the eaves of your houses. Your decay will be easy, odourless.

The fish will fatten their shadows on you and great whales will blot out your sun.

ALISON LESTER

Alison grew up overlooking the Southern Ocean. Her books take children from its sandy beaches to remote islands and the frozen continent of Antarctica.

Going south

A full moon shone in the darkening sky as we left Hobart and lights twinkled along the hills. Next morning there was no land in sight, just the dark blue, glittering sea. An albatross flew behind the ship, gliding over the troughs and peaks.

The waves got bigger every day and came from all directions (confused seas, the mate told me) and the ship rolled and pitched as though it was trying to shake us off. Some waves met the bow with such force it felt as though we’d hit a rock. Bang! Nearly everybody was seasick. In the deserted mess, tables and chairs bolted and chained to the floor, I clung to my mug as the portholes went completely underwater.

As we passed our first iceberg the sun came out and turned the sea into a churning silver mirror. Soon icebergs were everywhere, castles, pyramids and archways, some with glowing blue crevasses, one with a black stripe and another like a giant lump of jade.

After a week the seas calmed and the days stretched out with early lemon dawns and vivid red sunsets that lasted until midnight.

One night a green aurora stretched across the sky, shimmering and dancing in front of the stars.

The ship moved slowly now, pushing through the ice with loud bongs and scrapings, tilting occasionally over a growler, moving, always moving. We were tiny in a vast world, inconsequential. Finally we could see the mountains of Antarctica (it was real!) poking up through what I thought at first was mist but was in fact solid blue ice, the icecap. Katabatic winds barrelled down from it, blowing lightweights right off their feet.

When I called home that evening I could hear the magpies warbling behind our house and that still summer scene seemed as distant and alien as Mars.

ALISON MANN

Alison is a Nipaluna/Hobart-based playwright. Her play Amy’stattoo was recently shortlisted for the 2022–23 Queensland Premier’s Drama Award. She is fascinated by abyssal gigantism.

The largest eyes live in the ocean

Our human words have called you: Colossal Squid. Cephalopod. Head foot.

Your eyes just above your many limbs. Eight arms. Two tentacles. Beak. Suckers. Hooks. Eyes bigger than our human heads. A thousand metres deep sunlight does not reach your home the Circumpolar Current the most powerful clockwise water whirl around the ice continent. The only ocean to circle Earth. Your eye could fit both my hands inside it. Us air creatures don’t often see you. You don’t come to the surface. You get the bends. But when we do see you! You are magnified bits of our insides intestine stomach-like long bag of wriggling offal with dinner plate eyes fleshy sausage head. You are us turned inside out. You must find our small air dwelling inside gills and skeletoned standing bodies strange! How do your giant eyes see in darkness sunlight does not reach?

At the back of each eye. A photophore. A light organ. Literally. Head lights. To see prey. Predators. Kin. Us?

Your eyes, like human eyes: a single lens. A retina. Largest eyes of any known living creature. Your eyes are stuck in me. I can’t stop looking at you. Your circumpolar currents a colossal earth eye Antarctica the pupil. Keeps watch. Though we may never meet water that has passed through my mouth may have passed through your ocean gills. I’m so happy to share.

DAVID MASON

A former poet laureate of Colorado, David has lived in Tasmania since 2018. His most recent book of poems is PacificLight.

An accounting

This morning such a fog as to make me think of more occasions of occluded sight. We had gone only a few steps before we met them. The men and youths were arranged in the front … the women, the children and then the older girls, were a few paces behind. As their manner did not indicate any hostile design I hesitated not to go up to the oldest, who accepted, with a very good grace, a piece of biscuit that I offered him.

So wrote the naturalist, having sailed from France. He coveted a skin of kangaroo worn by a young girl, and traded her some trousers for it, of which she had no need. I find a record of their brief encounter in a book of Travellers’ Tales, and feel the closeness of the fog outside my window.

This is the same world. I know it now by the drone of engines from the salmon farms –generators, auxiliary motors throbbing like fresh wounds, vibrating the very air. And there is a music made by time, heard in the blood, as skeletal as memory.

The fog comes close, and with it a silent keening. The coming scarcity of animals and birds may be foretold on days like this, the sea and air gone white as a blank page on which a fresh accounting may be written of encounters that began in innocence but leave a reader quivering with grief.

Joy is a storyteller of oceans and ice, environmental historian, adjunct associate professor and author of WildSea:AHistoryoftheSouthernOcean.

The Southern Ocean is a deeply storied place. Some of its stories are familiar. They recount how northern empires, lured by the myth of an unknown southern land, dispatched emissaries to chart its waters and claim its bounty. When seafarers ventured into the vast ocean beyond the Great Capes, they encountered powerful currents and blanketing fog, screaming winds and cathedrals of ice, fertile waters and beaches swarming with life. Their stories sparked a frenzied rush for fur and oil, rendering its waters empty and its beaches silent.

The ocean holds other stories too, welling up from deep geological time and surging into our present. They tell of drifting continents and ice ages; penguin huddles and krill swarms; scientific voyaging and ghostly fish; the crushing beauty of winter pack ice and the unearthly blues of a glacial iceberg. Some have washed onto our southern shores, carried on the fabled wings of a wandering albatross or in the breath of a great whale as she greets human kin during her ancestral journeys between ice and coast.

For all its brief and often brutal human history, the Southern Ocean has much to teach us: about how its waters breathe in our carbon-soaked air and its sea ice modulates our climate. Humanity’s fate is entangled with its winds and currents and ice and myriad creatures. In the ocean’s powerful ebbs and flows, we find the interconnectedness of all living things. Listen closely, for the Southern Ocean’s stories are also our own.

ANNE MORGAN

Anne is a genre-hopping writer from Nipaluna/Hobart. She has an interest in 19th-century voyages through the Southern Ocean. Visit annemorgan.com.au

We are three days past the Cape and all our good hopes of an uneventful passage through the Rolling Forties have been blown away by northerly gales. Captain Angel is dead reckoning, unable to fix our position by the sun or stars. To keep the wind behind our ship, he insists on taking us further south.

Crew and passengers alike are on high alert. Last night the ship’s compasses went awry; and at dawn the watch spied the blink of ice, ten miles in the offing. God only knows if it was an iceberg or a snow-capped island.

All day we have been labouring in heaving seas, passing through squalls of hail and rain and intermittent sea fogs, sounding our bell to warn other ships of our presence. Passengers have begged our skipper to veer north, but they might have been pleading with the Flying Dutchman himself.

Miraculously, the fog lifted at seven this evening and we were within minutes of striking an outlying reef of one of the Crozet Islands. We hove-to and wore away on the starboard tack, and are again sailing south, to clear the archipelago.

As I pace the rolling decks, fog envelops us again. In this chilling, misty netherworld, I pray that the motto on our ship’s coat of arms should prove true: Nil desperandum auspice deo – with God’s help we have nothing to fear.

RHYS MULDOON

quis conclusit ostiis mare quando erumpebat quasi de vulva procedens?

And then we were still.

Swollen, furiously slapped, vilified, but still. One breath, gifted to each of us, fell into our lungs

His eye was a gash of red in a smoky room forgotten

Pillars of salt crumbling on each cheek

His black teeth smashed with a chair, Most of them pointing south.

From his ridiculous split and soiled lips: I want to go home

You are home now.

As he sat inside my open belly, scarred and torn by his sharpened metal, grey water sliding in, I sang a song to my family, ten thousand leagues away I have a man inside me who will never be reborn

I heard my mother’s voice

You are loved You are loved

You were Writer.

Mallika lives in the highlands and dives off the Tasmanian east coast. Her short-story collection is titled SheNever LooksQuiteBack (Penguin).

Visit linktr.ee/MallikaTheWriter

An encounter so blue

Yet again, we dive into the depths of emptiness, of scarred remains of a glorious past. “Some things don’t change” – an expression used in the past no longer applies in the year 3050. Barrenness has become our landscape, even underwater.

Blue is the colour of hope.

I sigh. My partner turns around in her rebreather suit, tries to get my eye contact. “Don’t fret.”

Her voice is a semitone higher through the soundenabled full-face mask. She flicks her fins, angles towards the deeper blue, searches, as I have been, constantly, for a sign.

An hour later, quite suddenly, there it is. The bubble! The underwater world of the past that was rumoured to exist only where it’s safest, somewhere in the Southern Ocean, off half-sunken Tasmania.

The swaying kelp forest mesmerises – tall, full, cramming the bubble invented before the ecosystem had collapsed. It’s a stadium-sized aquarium with optimum temperature, gases and nutrients, selfregulating, to conserve the lifeforms of previous centuries.

We whoop, cheer and hug clumsily. After our euphoria, we maintain buoyancy against the current and look through the discoloured wall.

We focus. We see nothing else than kelp. Our breathing gets shallower.

My forehead strains. I feel dizzy. Hope is wearing thin. And air.

Then, a flicker of colour!

One by one, creatures with snouts, stripes and leafy shapes on the frames of mini dragons appear from the kelp shadows. Hundreds of eyes peer at us as we peer at them.

“Some things don’t change,” I say.

Stephen spent nearly 40 years studying krill, mainly on the Southern Ocean. He has authored scientific articles, short stories, travel writing and one book.

The Southern Ocean multiverse

The Southern Ocean, to many, is only two dimensional – a blue expanse at the bottom of world maps. To me it is very real. I can see it as I write this. I have spent months on its turbulent surface, I have been battered by its waves, and have probed its mysterious depths with nets and instruments, yet I still find it difficult to comprehend. The Southern Ocean is inconceivably big – in volume and in area. Our perception of it: icy, dotted with penguins, icebergs and ripped by towering waves, is only true of the thin layer where the cold ocean meets the freezing atmosphere. Most plants and animals live in the thin surface layer where sunlight penetrates, giving life to microscopic plants that form the foundation of the Antarctic food chain. This surface layer is highly seasonal – light and warmer in summer, when life flourishes, and dark, cold and ice-covered in winter when many animals abandon the dark south to breed in the balmy waters to the north. The vast ocean’s interior has no seasons. Only a few deep-diving animals can withstand the massive pressure changes to access the constantly cool, black depths – a realm without time.

The Southern Ocean must be seen in all four dimensions to fully appreciate its enduring mystery –which is why it remains, and will remain, one of the least understood places on Earth.

Esther has long been fascinated by Antarctica. She won the $25,000 Tasmanian Literary Awards’ Tim Thorne Prize for Poetry, has four books, edits and mentors.

Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba)

I expel myself from my egg lit with zeal to uphold a world. Phytoplankton flow into my bud mouth and feed the sprouting of my starless eyes, my orchidlike frenzy of legs. Already, my defecation sequesters carbon.

My drift here is not purposeless. How would you sate each penguin, shearwater, seal?

How deliver to each blue whale its daily sixteen tonnes of food –in wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow?

Don’t assume of me a few weeks’ lifespan, a quick turnover.

As you trawl me to eat me as okiami and camarones, as scientists torture my sisters to see how much warming I can take, it is two years in Southern deeps before I float my gram of weight up into your kind’s sight and minds like a truth your conscience always knew.

Lionise me, then: I do an adroit sleight no one else is made for.

I turn plant life into animal, green into sentience, inertia into thrash, sun into flesh.

My current is the deepest, longest, strongest, stirring the great teacup of the world. I reckon with forces, numbers, so much bigger. At the climax of my six summers I tower in hundreds of trillions – no life has more mass. Astronauts view my murmuration with awe.

On Antarctica’s fine white china I am victuals laid out for the planet. A martyr’s glory in how the behemoth whales slap and lunge to bite through my swarm. Know my work to be superb, and vaster than your own.

ADAM OUSTON

Adam is a novelist. His debut novel, Waypoints , was nominated for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the ALS Gold Medal and the Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prize. He lives in Nipaluna.

Ends of the world

Of all people it was James Cook who lamented the discovery, not least because it would prove his “erratic” rival, Alexander Dalrymple, correct, and while they’d been embroiled in stoushes both public and petty – at one point Dalrymple accused Cook of “not looking hard enough” for it – the decorated captain would miss the little wet lettuce, whose land-loving, desk-thumping insistence that the continent existed, despite all evidence, bordered on the ecclesiastical if not the downright unhinged, for the facts were that Cook had looked and never found, and although he might have been accused of merely keeping the game alive, Cook could not bring himself to conceal what now had become plain, it was there, because it was tempting to live with the possibility of discovery, the mystery, which had existed since Aristotle, and had featured on maps before any observation, and so, wrote Cook, what a great shame to discover it, “to wholly clear the matter up once and for all,” so that all the conjecture, the chatter, the fist-thumping and namecalling and clever insults – Dalrymple had described him as “all tip and no iceberg” – all of it would end; but of course it wasn’t the end because only recently the industrial private equity investor, retired naval officer, sub-orbital spaceflight participant and undersea explorer, Victor Vescovo, was the first person to reach the bottom of the Southern Ocean at a depth of 7434 metres – a poet’s errand if ever there was one – which he did just for kicks, for deep-sea mining, so he says, is completely unprofitable.

Yvette lives in Campbell Town/Tyerrernotepanner Country and is the author of over 50 books for young people. She continues to write about islands.

Fore and aft

I am the lone guest aboard the Lady Nelson a bitter Friday in July years ago now setting sail from the dock up the Derwent my gaze hungry for its grey-green banks green-grey mystery below and to the waters beyond, where voyagers on vessels much larger head south to the dark and the deep, joining giant creatures and those still to be recorded.

The camaraderie of the crew sharing secrets with the landlubber, humouring me, perhaps, good-naturedly instead I saw it as an an invitation to a different life, a place I knew but didn’t really, not at all, on reflection –I’d spent years writing about an island thinking about an island imagining an island

JANE RAWSON

Jane’s most recent novels are AHistoryofDreamsand FromtheWreck . Her nonfiction book, Human/Nature , will be published in 2025 by NewSouth.

The Barber, 1859

In August 1859, SS Admella was wrecked on Carpenters Reef in the Southern Ocean. Eighty-nine humans and two horses died. The author’s great-greatgrandfather, George Hills, and champion racehorse The Barber survived: Hills rescued by lifeboat and The Barber because he swam to shore. Now, Melbourne: Australian Champion Sweepstakes Day, 1 October 1859, two months after the wreck, two minutes before the race. The Barber is 104 to 4 against.

You have not seen running, The Barber says. There is not one among you who knows freedom.

The floor beneath me tips and I slide, tumble waterwards. A huge field: as large as the whole horizon. My feet push through its surface, my legs, my chest and I am inside it, inside the field. You have flung yourself over a fence, felt yourself free of all weight? It is the work of a moment. This was a leap eternal.

The two-legs, as slow and feeble in the eternal paddock as they were on soil, knew only one way: down. But Jupiter too. You remember Jupiter? A mighty runner. But there, he stood, he froze, he fell.

The gate? No. Please: if this is all you know, then run at your pleasure. No more straight for me. No more ahead ahead ahead. My legs were once free. If it is not a world all up and all down, a stretch of forever; if it is not the buffeting of waves and the sweet flash of seahorses, then I say no sir.

Thank you, no. I will stand.

Tansy lives near Kingston Beach, and she once wrote a story about a Kraken invasion of Hobart. Her latest novel is TimeoftheCat . Visit tansyrr.com

Sirens are not seagulls

Sirens are not seagulls

They will not steal your crumbs

Or peck your eyes

But they will absolutely steal your hot chips

Right out of the paper.

Sirens promise everything

Deliver nothing

Their song is dangerous, (drowning) empty

Sirens are not dolphins

They reside on the rocks

Not in the sea

They never dance for tourists.

Sirens are not seals

Or sharks Or salmon

You’ll never see them coming.

Here at the edge of the world

The water is brisk

The sky is bright

Sirens wait & wait to drown you

Or

If you’re very unlucky

Sirens will shout it to the sky

Next time you buy hot chips & you know what that means …

the seagulls will be waiting.

THERESA SAINTY

Theresa is a Palawa woman. She is a researcher and public speaker. Theresa is also a writer, in both English and her language, palawa kani.

Palawa: Enduring voices of the Southern Ocean

The First People, Palawa, of the island at the bottom of the world were the first voices and mariners of the great expanse that is called by colonial settlers the Southern Ocean. Having been here in Lutruwita (Tasmania) paywuta manta – since the time of Creation – we are the enduring voices of the Southern Ocean.

Palawa Ngini (the Old People) were accomplished mariners and builders of several different watercraft.

Tuylini is made from the bark of the Stringybark tree, and is also the word for the bark, tree and canoe. Ninga is a canoe made of tea tree bark. The tea tree and its bark are called “ninga” too. Both ninga and tuylini watercraft are made by tying three layers of bark bundles together with long grass.

Another form of canoe is made with dry rushes. This type of canoe has five layers.

Wurati, of Lunawuni (Bruny Island), was a Nununi man and a great storyteller, who told of his people’s seafaring prowess, including that they sailed to De Witt Island, the Eddystone and other rocks/islands off the southern and southwestern coast to hunt seals. Their canoes were large enough to carry up to eight people, and dogs and spears!

Unfortunately, the impact of colonisation pushed canoe-building knowledge to the deep recesses of the memory of our people, and we stopped building them. However, since 2007, with the first tuylini built by Palawa men in over 150 years unveiled at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, there has been a re-awakening of knowledge and a resurgence of canoe builders within the Palawa community. We always have been a people of great skill and adaptability.

Katherine travelled by ship to Antarctica 35 years ago to research her first novel. She is now an award-winning author of international bestsellers, and lives in Lutruwita/Tasmania.

Ice blue

I lean out through the wide-open porthole, looking down to where the orange hull meets the sea. A thin layer of ice has formed on top of the water, like the skin on a coffee gone cold.

The swell rises and falls beneath the skin. A slow, heaving breath, weighed down. Small white balls of ice are scattered there, stars against a grey night.

My own skin is warm from the shower. I’m wrapped only in a towel, wet hair draping my shoulders. The window onto this ocean world is a magnet that won’t let me go. Without breaking my gaze, I reach behind me for some clothes.

I feel my way into thermal underlayers, then pull on the wool shirt and windproof jacket that were issued to me back in Hobart. Everything is too large – men’s clothing swamping my small frame.

Soon I’m leaning out again, peering down, a notebook and pencil in hand.

The sea-skin thickens. Eventually the surface is covered with a paving of translucent ice plates. Frozen wind patterns are captured there, picked out in pink by the low-hanging sun.

The only sound is the hum of the ship’s engine.

As the ship shoulders its way ahead, cracks reach out into the ice plates. Broken chunks of the frozen seawater lift against each other, poised for a moment, before one slides under.

The colour of the ice beneath the sea matches the blue lines on my notebook. Ice blue.

My pencil hovers, hunting.

RACHAEL TREASURE

Rachael is a Tasmanian-born novelist and regenerative farmer. Her grandmother, Joan Wise, taught her to love the natural world and use storytelling as a superpower.

The grandmother by the sea

On Stapleton Beach she took my little hand and led me to the middens. We sat upon a blonde rock beside that mother-of-pearl mound, mourning the silenced feast. Grano made sure I knew of the invaders. Rough men in boats, taking young girls not much older than me. In a tannin trance, I’d watched the creek weave through sand to sea, shuddering for girls dragged screaming over beaches. She pointed to the island, named prettily after someone’s wife, Maria. Her own mother’s name was shaped by the sea. Coralie. Born on a rocking wooden ship on her voyage “out here”.

Grano’s strong hands wrapped the oars, slicing timber blades through tumbling waves. Fishing lines of thick green twine wrapped simply around wooden blocks, we’d flip our silvered King flathead feast into the well of her fibreglass dinghy, the first of its kind in Tasmania.

Near her bushland shack on a tree stump, skins were peeled from rabbits and fillets slid from fish spines. Her jaw tensed with determination, prizing flesh from abalone and mussels. In the evenings cray pots were chucked casually off the rocks, our red crustacean bounty as certain as the sunrise.

Some weekends Dad took his mother-in-law’s boat, beerishly outboarding through bull kelp sailing us kids over dumpers. The crescent net of the seine burgeoning with gar fish, their scale-stars captured in torch beams. Kids high on phosphorescence magic. The men drunk on booze.

These days salmon farms blast lights like prisons, blinding those already blind and deafened to industrial thrum. Green mucus has arrived to the bays. The middens are sand-drowned. The creeks eroded. The natural springs road smothered. Priceless seaside bush now million-dollar shacks. Bird choruses silent. Cray pots empty.

My grandmother’s boat has long since been washed out to sea … taken by a king tide of global greed. But the old shack remains, and I am the latest greyhaired lady here teaching my children to remember the natural rhythm of women and of seas.

Coral lives in Hobart. She is an author and illustrator and has worked on over 60 books in children’s literature, both fiction and nonfiction.

There are days when a mist is born from this ocean. It rises gracefully, seduced by the land, to slip between the angled buildings and tangled green of the bush, obscuring all familiarity in a hazy mist. It’s a levitating, quiet pause, and the noise of the everyday is silenced.

It dares us to dream a little.

You’re offered a rest from the organisation and responsibilities of life around you and listen to the quiet that is enveloping you – blurring the noisy horizon.

But I also have reoccurring dreams, and all are connected to voyaging south on that ocean. Each have their own peculiar script, but all begin with the fear of leaving behind the materials I need to draw, paint and write for the journey ahead.

Once on the ship we cannot turn back. It’s too late to fret about organisation and I need to translate what I can, however I can.

The evening lights of Hobart wash away and the dark ocean and sky merge. The constant heartbeat of the waves gently reminds me this is my new world. It forces me to stop and accept this world of beauty and humility, a world away from the everyday. It always ends with a mist rising from the ocean and the warmth of the morning lights of Hobart luring us home.

But I wake with an ache for the ocean and hope for another day of mist so, just for a moment, I can dream from the shore.

CLAIRE VAN RYN

Claire is an awarded writer, journalist and author of two novels set in Tasmania. She is both inspired by and afraid of the ocean.

Ballast

Dear Petra,

The albatross is in the back freezer, second shelf, beside the fur seal (I’ll deal with him next week). I owe you, legit – negronis and salumi at Mary Mary?

I’ve made a start; stomach contents riddled with microplastics, as usual, along with a tangle of fishing line and a rusty hook. Poor blighter. Awful way to go.

Please wire wings for flight. He will be suspended in the Earth and Life Gallery, above the Adélie penguins on the ice floe Otto’s working on. Glass eyes are on my desk (I sequestered them as stocks are low again). If anyone asks where he came from, feign ignorance. Road kill? Or blame me. Just don’t tell them where I am.

Nan once said, “All that is fierce is your ballast.” The Southern Lights made a silhouette of her, all that fluorescence like a chemical reaction. She’s in my ear, her eyes flashing polar blue. You know what she was like.

They can’t keep doing this. I am fierce. Pray that I’ll be fierce?

And don’t touch my old English jelly babies. – Genni.

BEN WALTER

Ben writes on Melukerdee Country in Tasmania’s Huon Valley. He is the author of the short story collection, WhatFearWas .

Lassitude line

an ebb haunts the wild rolling and the waves lose swim; spluttering froth, a trauma of scurrying chop, a scuttling of self – the flex of water, its rhythm undone; crests become troughs, finger ripples brush air then the surge tumbles in deep cold, surfs lonely sand; buried in self –the weight of water, a forgetting; breaking, alone in the depths. this lost-heart shark; this drowning bear. collapsing on the shore would be too much effort for the glitter.

Suyanti is a Hobart ecologist who LOVES freediving. She writes to explore the strange nuances of human/ nature relationships and hosts the podcast Drivenby nature

The cray

The water is all silence and light diffuse. The sea accepts me on an inhale.

I feel so much more beautiful here, where there is no breath. Where everything is flow against flow.

A woman suspended – head to the shadows, feet to the sky – sees as seaweed. Stillness means nothing here. The water pulls and I loosen; filled with blue.

Sinking, sinking.

.

Now, a ledge, pink leather and feathers, darkness beneath. I pull close to anchor. Out of the black emerge antennae; quivering closeness, red-cased anxiety. Ten legs loaded for retreat. We are both fierce vulnerability. There is no air for thinking.

Grip and don’t let go, I’ve been told, it’ll kick like a horse. My hand springs out over black pearl eyes.

Scamper back, clutch shell, clutch rock. Hold. My diaphragm, her abdomen; all muscles bend towards life. I pull the cray from her home. The sun calls us up with the urgency of breath.

I don’t feel beautiful anymore, I feel bloody. Exhilarated.

Later, after we have cracked open each leg and sucked white meat from within, I descend from camp to the rocks where I had pressed knife into hard shell between her eyes, then slid blade between abdomen and carapace to separate meat from organs. She still sits there, facing west towards the seething ocean. I crouch down, peer inside. A small organ, held to her back with white lace, contracts and expands with the same rhythm as my own heart.

DANIELLE WOOD

Danielle is the author of numerous books, including the Australian/Vogel Literary Award-winning novel The AlphabetofLightandDark , set partly on Macquarie Island.

Longliner

Muroaji, uwashi, muroaji, sama, uwashi, ika. Bait fish pay out over the stern, perfectly patterned as a plate of sashimi. Muroaji, uwashi, muroaji, sama, uwashi, ika. Three species of mackerel punctuated by a squid. Hands sharp as a chef’s, the bait man hooks the thawing bodies according to the fishing master’s design, refined each day by the master’s divinations in the guts of slit-open tuna.

A conveyor trundles the baited branchlines to the man in the red hat, who clips them to the tarred length of the longline, redoubling the sequence’s complexity with intervals of weights and floats. Every five and a half seconds, a precise and patient reminder: beep. Beep, clip, beep, clip, beep, clip as the ship lifts and falls on the wind-whipped swell. At the stern, two men hurl the baits out into a thick and flapping soup of birds.

Inside the red wool hat, the man’s mind swims with numbers. One hundred kilometres of longline, 2800 hooks. Every morning, five and half hours of linesetting. Every afternoon into night, up to 12 hours of hauling, gaffing, gutting, icing. One hundred days at sea. No rest. 10,000 kilometres of longline. 280,000 hooks. 550 hours of setting, 1200 of hauling. He knows by heart the flourish of the cook each morning in the mess, tearing the day from the calendar, crumpling it into the bin.

CASSANDRA WUNSCH

Cassandra is a writer and arts worker. She has been a stage manager, production assistant, organisation director and alternately shy then excitable public nuisance.

Bond

Both to restrain and to bind together

Bound around and kept separate; or bound together, held fast

Sometimes solid, other times intangible, holding us fast and enforcing boundaries

Bonds require maintenance

Care

Attention

Imposed or sought, provided by intention or providence our bonds define our edges

And connect us to others

If they fray or dissolve our edges become vague and frightening

Our relationships are broken and estranged

We require our boundaries and our connections

Rely on our bonds

Between people, emotions

Between nations, oceans.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

DEAN GREENO

Dean is an artist and researcher who was born on Flinders Island following a long succession of ancestral generations in the Furneaux Islands in Bass Strait. Dean relocated to Launceston with his parents (Lola Greeno and Rex Greeno) in the 1970s.

Dean’s practice responds to his cultural origins, family legacy and connections with Country. Known for his practice with driftwood sculptures, Dean has also become active in research and advocacy projects focussed on the effects of climate change, in particular, the management of oceans, coasts and waterways. Through his work, he advocates for solutions which draw upon Traditional Knowledge working closely with Aboriginal Elders.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

DR ANNALISE REES

Annalise is a Tasmanian based visual artist working in the expanded field of drawing. With interests that span terrestrial and marine contexts Annalise’s work engages with place and is often site responsive.

Completing a PhD at the University of Tasmania (2017), she has undertaken residencies and exhibited internationally, including travelling twice to the sub-Antarctic on Australia’s blue water research vessel Investigator

Her practice foregrounds manual drawing as an essential human skill for negotiating, translating and communicating experience of self and world.

An initiative of

This Nipaluna/Hobart anthology features short written contributions about the Southern Ocean from more than 50 writers across the city and some further afield whose work has engaged with these waters. Through a range of styles and genres including splash fiction, reflective prose, micro-nonfiction and polar poetry, these authors form a chorus of voices for the Southern Ocean, its creatures and its future.

The anthology includes a foreword by the Right Honourable Lord Mayor of Hobart, Councillor Anna Reynolds, and introductions by Professor Elizabeth Leane and Jamie Graham-Blair. Supported with artwork by Dr Annalise Rees and Dean Greeno, the contributing writers include:

Kim Bambrook

Alyssa Bermudez

Meg Bignell

Carmel Bird

Christina Booth

Karen Brooks

Bob Brown

Michelle Cahill

Lucy Christopher

Cally Conan-Davies

Young Dawkins

Sarah Day

Madeleine Delany

Emily Direen

Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn

Rae Earl

Adrienne Eberhard

Liz Evans

Lily Fletcher Stojcevski

Tony Flowers

Nicole Gill

Susie Greenhill

Dr Cameron Hindrum

Erin Hortle

Arianne James

Katherine Johnson

Gail Jones

Kate Kruimink

Alison Lester

Alison Mann

David Mason

Dr Joy McCann

Anne Morgan

Rhys Muldoon

Mallika Naguran

Stephen Nicol

Esther Ottaway

Adam Ouston

Yvette Poshoglian

Jane Rawson

Tansy Rayner Roberts

Theresa Sainty

Katherine Scholes

Rachael Treasure

Coral Tulloch

Claire van Ryn

Ben Walter

Suyanti Winoto-Lewin

Danielle Wood

Cassandra Wunsch