The Sea Inside

leads them to sources of food, but allows them to navigate their way, orientating themselves to an olfactory seascape.
    Yet even as they ride the updraughts on their exquisitely narrow wings, flying so free, they are susceptible to the activities of the human-altered world. Accidental death now haunts these birds, snagged by longlines or caught in nets. From the artificial islands of trash gathered by the Pacific gyre, albatross parents forage for bits of plastic that look like tasty morsels of squid and feed them to their chicks. Their bellies filled with drink loops, used cigarette lighters and tampon applicators, the chicks starve to death, leaving plastic-stuffed skeletons as modern
memento mori
.
    As the albatross glides out of sight, we swerve into a feeding frenzy of short-tailed shearwaters, ‘mutton birds’ to the locals who still prize their oily flesh. Their teeming shapes turn the sky into a living, squawking cloud, plucking at the sea with their wings. In his
History of Tasmania
, published in 1850, the Reverend John West reports on such immense flocks, as seen by Matthew Flinders, who first charted these waters in 1802. ‘Captain Flinders
…
says that when near the north-west extremity of Van Diemen’s Land he saw a stream...from fifty to eighty yards in depth, and of three hundred yards or more in breadth...during a full
hour-and-a-half
this stream of petrels continued to pass without interruption, at a rate little inferior to the swiftness of the pigeon. On the lowest computation he thought the number could not have been less than a hundred millions.’

    Out of the bird-cloud comes a trumpeting blow, followed by a subtler whoosh, an intensely familiar sound to me: a humpback whale, travelling with its calf. They’re stragglers in the spring migration, dawdling on their way to the feeding grounds – despite the mother’s hunger, as evident from the vertebrae visible beneath her reduced blubber, having given all her energy to her calf. Her kind, like the southern rights, have been swimming this route for centuries. The Aboriginal people, to whom the sea was only an extension of their Dreaming, and who, like the whales, had no home, only a deep sense of their connection to their environment and a forty-thousand-year-old culture, would ‘sing up’ the whales, prompting them to breach in joy for the calves they were about to bear, or those they brought back with them. They also believed that when whales stranded themselves, they did so to feed human tribes in ‘an act of courtesy, an act of promise’.
    In ten years of whalewatching off Cape Cod, I’ve seen dozens of humpback mothers and calves. But there is something different about this pair. Perhaps it’s the way they feed, lunging on their sides rather than gathering up their bait-fish in a net of bubbles. Or perhaps it’s the female’s flukes, much whiter than those of her northern counterparts. The image of the pale mother against the black rocks is as stark and elusive as the solemn portraits of native people I’d seen in Hobart’s museum; as if neither were really made for me to see. A promise, and a courtesy.

    Just north of Adventure Bay, on the narrow neck that links North and South Bruny, is a sandy stretch where blue penguins waddle ashore at night to feed their chicks, running the gauntlet of the open beach to reach their young nesting in burrows in the dunes. High over this slender strand stands a stone cairn with the bronze relief of a woman’s face; her name, Truganini; her dates, 1812–1876; and nothing else.
    Truganini was the daughter of Mangana, chief of the people of Lunawanna-alonnah, as Bruny Island was known to her tribe. Their ancestors had lived there for thirty thousand years. But at the age of seventeen, Truganini watched her mother being stabbed to death by men from a whaling ship. Shortly after, sealers abducted her two sisters and took them to Kangaroo Island as slaves. Her brother was killed and her stepmother taken by escaped convicts. Then she and her betrothed were kidnapped by lumberjacks and taken to the mainland. During the crossing her husband-to-be was thrown overboard; as he tried to climb back on board, the men cut off his hands, leaving their victim to drown. Truganini was then repeatedly raped. Her shocked father, Mangana, died soon afterwards.
    Truganini was witness to brutalities which the Reverend John West could hardly bear to iterate. ‘If it were possible in a work like this to record