WHAT COMES TO MIND … MAGDA SZUBANSKI AND I ARE ALL AT SEA
- 5 hours ago
- 6 min read
Here we have the next instalment in What Comes To Mind, an alternative series in the Wind Back Wednesday space, based on the work of the brilliant photographer Stuart Spence, whose not-so-secret goal was to dig into my brain or soul or what might pass for both.
Each time, he pulls out a photo from his archives going back almost 50 years and challenges me to respond with what comes to mind when I look at that image. It might be serious or ridiculous, personal or historical, but it will be inspired by a photo I’ve not seen before, and maybe even unseen by anyone beyond Stuart himself.
This week, Magda Szubanski caught on the low seas in high wind looks both terrified and defiant, apparently clinging to brown rubber hope but ready to stand alone if that’s what’s required. I’ve got to admire her bravery to go there with the concept and be as foolish as required, but maybe I come from a lineage not quite ready to be the same.
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AT THE SOUTHERN END of Mauritius, an island the size of a pin on any map and easily traversed in a few hours for those who stick a pin in that map and go there – I’ve done it! Ask me how! – there are surf beaches I am told. A famous left-break at Tamarin Bay is popular, if you can get past the territorial locals who, having not read the tourist brochures extolling the easy-going nature of Mauritians (who love you all oh yes we do), seem disinclined to share with foreigners.
As at least one video I’ve watched shows, “Go spend your time and money at the many resorts at the north and north-eastern end of Mauritius”, or words to that effect, is what they are wont to declare in accents alarmingly like one of my uncles, while bobbing on their boards and gesturing in that universally understood manner that seems to suggest anatomically complex if not physically impossible actions.
For most people who aren’t lounging at a Club Med but serving there, or servicing its facilities, or just running regular lives in the interior towns like Curepipe, Quatre Bornes or Rose Hill – the areas where my family lived and where I was born – surfing isn’t even on the agenda, and when they do go sur la plage it is to a placid lagoon-like spot, like they’ve always done.
As the old ones remember, that’s somewhere you could sit on the grass rather than sand, and eat, drink, sing a song or three or play football or volleyball. Like civilised people. Maybe have a bit of a paddle or slip into the still, warm waters and lie there thinking of England … or South Africa, or France, Canada or Australia – wherever they might emigrate soon.
Get out past the breaking swell and ride on some bit of plastic or wood or whatever the hell that is? Hell, just standing up in the surf like Magda Szubanski? You’re more than a bit fou you know. Or at best, simple, you tiet kouyon. And there is good reason to think so, as any of my relatives could attest.
Family legend has it that at some very young age – definitely before I turned three-and-a-half, as that’s what I was when we jumped on to the Patris and sailed east across the Indian Ocean, the olds having wisely decided going west to be a Cape Coloured in South Africa was not really a big step up – I nearly drowned. In the placid waters no less. Quelle horreur.
See, I told you!, my grandmother likely said, after checking that I hadn’t contributed to my fate by breaking the very scientific rule of never swimming after eating a banana, that merde is dangerous. Next thing you’ll be on some inflatable beach toy pushed out to sea in a cyclone (peak season in Mauritius is November to April if you’re wondering) heading out of control to Rodrigues. Or Madagascar. And not like the cute animals either.
(Did this really happen? I honestly could not say. It was retold often enough that I swear I had a “memory” of it for a long time, and it was not outside the realms of possibility in the days when parents were rather more laissez faire with supervision, and little idiots – see, “tiet kouyon” – had faster little legs than thinking power. But then my mother always insisted she was touched and had had a vision of Winston Churchill dying just before she gave birth to me, which we believed for decades until I checked the dates and found he died a few days after. So, let’s say there’s a bit of flexibility in believability.)
When Mauritians started coming to Australia in the late ‘60s, a few stopped at the first port of Perth, but most chose the more job-ready Melbourne and Sydney. And in Sydney they eschewed the coastal strips for the inner-urban likes of Canterbury, Campsie, Belmore and Belfield – post-Greeks, Italians and eastern Europeans much like the Szubanskis ; pre-Lebanese, Vietnamese and Africans. Did we come for the waters, Captain Renault? Hardly. We were not misinformed, just poor and looking for others like us.
But when we did venture to the coast, was it to the white sands and white faces of the shire? The red sands and incomprehensible tans of the northern beaches? The working class waves of the eastern suburbs? You know, the defining elements of Australian outdoor culture. The reason Sydney people dreamed of winning the Opera House lottery so they could wake up to endless horizons and the tang of salt in the air.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Hahahahahahahahahahaha. No.
Instead, we went to Ramsgate, on flat flat flat Botany Bay, with a view across the water to the airport and refineries, a busy road behind us, and a smell of industry and something less defined that clung to us for days afterwards in the air. Of course we did.
Did the planes suggest travel or connection to our homes? The factories a connection to the places many of the adults were finding their first jobs here? The cars a reminder of the relative affluence now for people who’d mostly ridden the clapped out buses all week and walked to mass each Sunday? The poetry of the new migrants?
Nah, don’t get fancy. Here in the shade of unlikely trees – palm? Buggered if I know, but they were very tall for a small Mauritian whose father never liked root-growing/leaf-shedding/sun-obscuring shrubbery bigger than a modest lemon tree – we could pull out our containers of gajaks, more substantial gateau piment and dohl puri, sourced from various grandmas in the community, and maybe tinned lychees recent visitors had brought in from Mauritius, and sit at tables or on chairs. Like civilised people.
How’s the serenity? What? Sorry, that 727 flew over just as you spoke.
Then, after a good period of time beyond any meal so as to avoid that deathly collapse of the full stomach in the shallow waters – yes Memee, it’s been two hours, I promise – we might venture into the nowhere-near-as-warm-as-Mauritius waters in up to our knees. Maybe higher on a hot day. Never on a li-lo or anything inflatable mind, not unless they were tethered to a building lest we head to New Zealand, but still, in the water!
Ah, beach culture, eh? We couldn’t be more Australian.
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