Giles Watson's poetry and prose
Fishing Net and Billy
The scene is the Stromlo pine forest, near Canberra, 1971. I am two or three years old, carrying my father’s fishing net and billy-can. The inscription on the back of the photograph says “Giles on a fishing trip in pine forests near home in Weston, A.C.T.”, but there were no fishing trips, in the normal sense of the word, in our family at that time. (Later, when I was twelve or thirteen, I had my own brief fishing craze. I would go down to the local dam to catch carp for feeding my captive kookaburras, but the kookaburras rapidly lost the taste for carp, and the phase ended.) The billy can and the net had more important purposes. Sometimes, they were used to catch live food: Daphnia, or water-fleas, for my father’s tropical fish. Occasionally, they were taken on yabbying expeditions, and the fresh-water crayfish would brandish their claws at my little fingers as they plopped into the bottom of the billy. More than once, they were used for catching Gambusias, small, introduced, live-bearing fish the size of guppies. I kept these in fish-tanks of my own, because they were easier to keep than the tropicals, since they did not require heated water. Once, I made the mistake of combining them with tadpoles, and the Gambusias, pihrana-like, swept about mutilating the tadpoles’ tails, leaving them bobbing rudderless on the surface. We had a separate billy-can for brewing the tea when camping; this one was solely reserved for water creatures, not because of any fastidiousness, but because my father feared that the detergent used to clean the tea-billy might be injurious the fish.
The little brown corduroy bag around my waist was hand-made by my mother, perhaps on the old treadle Singer machine which she always preferred to her modern electrical one. Ever since, I have always needed bags and pockets, and these became the defining feature of my first fantasy character, Hingefinkle, whose cloak was covered with pockets containing a dizzying array of specimens and apparatus. No doubt my own bag was soon to be filled with Cicada nymphs, gum-moth pupae, and the goggle-eyed cones of Casuarinas.
The pine forest was filled with the introduced conifer, Pinus radiata, which provided a building material and a source of pulp for paper, but which subsequently proved to be an entirely inappropriate crop. Bushfires consumed the plantations, and the turpentine in the pine-needles contributed to the firestorms which engulfed suburban dwellings in Weston Creek. I was in Durham, U.K., by then: exiled, prematurely old, licking wounds, and I read of the fires with rising horror, and thought, somehow, of those tadpoles.
The bridge crosses the river where we used to look for tennis balls, washed down from a tennis court upstream. Somewhere near the bridge, there was a cattle grid, and when I squatted, bare knees about my head, to look within, a bright green frog looked up at me, imitating my pose.
I still recognise myself in the picture. I am still this boy when the survival instinct kicks in with all its blessed forgetfulness, and those wounds are temporarily forgotten. Robert Frost speaks of a similar happy regression, “…when I am weary of considerations,/ And life is too much like a pathless wood/ Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs/ Broken across it, and one eye is weeping/ From a twig’s having lashed across it open.” He dreams of climbing a birch tree and swinging its branches, as he did when he was a boy. The net and the billy have given way to a camera and a pencil, but when the muse calls I may still turn, half-way across the bridge, my mouth in the middle of saying something, the joy of the unsoiled moment flashing in my squinting eyes.
*
A thick haze of mist swirled over the surface of the pond, and whirled in eddies as my father poised the net. The look of anticipation in his eyes was enough to make me tremble from head to toe. Suddenly, decisively, he plunged it into the water, and a moment later, it came up dripping and bulging. A frond of waterweed slimed slowly down the outside of the net as the water sluiced through the fine mesh. Beneath the surface of the pond, mud-clouds blossomed.
He was peering into the net now, pond-water cascading over his hands, motioning for me to come closer. I craned my neck to look inside, and yelped with surprise and delight. A stalk-eyed yabby gazed up at me, its claws waving ineffectually, and unafraid of the pincers, my father reached into the net and pulled the creature out, deftly grasping it by the thorax. It flicked its articulated tail frantically, and the claws gnashed like crocodile jaws as he held it before my delighted eyes, before tossing it into a billy can, half full of green water. With a mysterious smile, my father dangled the inverted net inside the can, snapped shut the lid, and together we wandered back home through the mist, the dew soaking into our shoes.
*
The tiny heart was beating beneath my gaze, as the creature threshed its twiggy appendages. Its eye was black and deep, and I thought I detected a look of desperation deep within it. I clapped my eye harder to the eyepiece, and my father’s hand guided mine to the focus knob of the microscope. He showed me how to fine-tune the focus until every bristle seemed a mighty spike, and every internal organ in the creature’s transparent body could be seen to writhe and pulsate. I was mesmerized.
“Daphnia,” he said quietly. “A water-flea.” And then he was silent, and I knew he was savouring the moment, watching with his own calm delight as a child of three discovered a whole new world in a drop of water. As the days passed, he taught me about them all: the strange Paramecium who wandered this way and that, like a lost torpedo, guided by a thousand tiny cilia; the grotesque Amoeba who swallowed other creatures whole with a bulge of its body, engulfing them in slime; and the strange, stalked Vorticella, their mouths shaped like plumbers’ plungers, gaping for food. For weeks, my whole life seemed absorbed by this world in miniature, and populated by its unearthly monsters. My father’s hand held mine as we drew them in pencil: a father and his son, both filled with the wonder of discovery, as if we were the first scientists in the world.
Photograph by Leslie Watson, 1971.
Fishing Net and Billy
The scene is the Stromlo pine forest, near Canberra, 1971. I am two or three years old, carrying my father’s fishing net and billy-can. The inscription on the back of the photograph says “Giles on a fishing trip in pine forests near home in Weston, A.C.T.”, but there were no fishing trips, in the normal sense of the word, in our family at that time. (Later, when I was twelve or thirteen, I had my own brief fishing craze. I would go down to the local dam to catch carp for feeding my captive kookaburras, but the kookaburras rapidly lost the taste for carp, and the phase ended.) The billy can and the net had more important purposes. Sometimes, they were used to catch live food: Daphnia, or water-fleas, for my father’s tropical fish. Occasionally, they were taken on yabbying expeditions, and the fresh-water crayfish would brandish their claws at my little fingers as they plopped into the bottom of the billy. More than once, they were used for catching Gambusias, small, introduced, live-bearing fish the size of guppies. I kept these in fish-tanks of my own, because they were easier to keep than the tropicals, since they did not require heated water. Once, I made the mistake of combining them with tadpoles, and the Gambusias, pihrana-like, swept about mutilating the tadpoles’ tails, leaving them bobbing rudderless on the surface. We had a separate billy-can for brewing the tea when camping; this one was solely reserved for water creatures, not because of any fastidiousness, but because my father feared that the detergent used to clean the tea-billy might be injurious the fish.
The little brown corduroy bag around my waist was hand-made by my mother, perhaps on the old treadle Singer machine which she always preferred to her modern electrical one. Ever since, I have always needed bags and pockets, and these became the defining feature of my first fantasy character, Hingefinkle, whose cloak was covered with pockets containing a dizzying array of specimens and apparatus. No doubt my own bag was soon to be filled with Cicada nymphs, gum-moth pupae, and the goggle-eyed cones of Casuarinas.
The pine forest was filled with the introduced conifer, Pinus radiata, which provided a building material and a source of pulp for paper, but which subsequently proved to be an entirely inappropriate crop. Bushfires consumed the plantations, and the turpentine in the pine-needles contributed to the firestorms which engulfed suburban dwellings in Weston Creek. I was in Durham, U.K., by then: exiled, prematurely old, licking wounds, and I read of the fires with rising horror, and thought, somehow, of those tadpoles.
The bridge crosses the river where we used to look for tennis balls, washed down from a tennis court upstream. Somewhere near the bridge, there was a cattle grid, and when I squatted, bare knees about my head, to look within, a bright green frog looked up at me, imitating my pose.
I still recognise myself in the picture. I am still this boy when the survival instinct kicks in with all its blessed forgetfulness, and those wounds are temporarily forgotten. Robert Frost speaks of a similar happy regression, “…when I am weary of considerations,/ And life is too much like a pathless wood/ Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs/ Broken across it, and one eye is weeping/ From a twig’s having lashed across it open.” He dreams of climbing a birch tree and swinging its branches, as he did when he was a boy. The net and the billy have given way to a camera and a pencil, but when the muse calls I may still turn, half-way across the bridge, my mouth in the middle of saying something, the joy of the unsoiled moment flashing in my squinting eyes.
*
A thick haze of mist swirled over the surface of the pond, and whirled in eddies as my father poised the net. The look of anticipation in his eyes was enough to make me tremble from head to toe. Suddenly, decisively, he plunged it into the water, and a moment later, it came up dripping and bulging. A frond of waterweed slimed slowly down the outside of the net as the water sluiced through the fine mesh. Beneath the surface of the pond, mud-clouds blossomed.
He was peering into the net now, pond-water cascading over his hands, motioning for me to come closer. I craned my neck to look inside, and yelped with surprise and delight. A stalk-eyed yabby gazed up at me, its claws waving ineffectually, and unafraid of the pincers, my father reached into the net and pulled the creature out, deftly grasping it by the thorax. It flicked its articulated tail frantically, and the claws gnashed like crocodile jaws as he held it before my delighted eyes, before tossing it into a billy can, half full of green water. With a mysterious smile, my father dangled the inverted net inside the can, snapped shut the lid, and together we wandered back home through the mist, the dew soaking into our shoes.
*
The tiny heart was beating beneath my gaze, as the creature threshed its twiggy appendages. Its eye was black and deep, and I thought I detected a look of desperation deep within it. I clapped my eye harder to the eyepiece, and my father’s hand guided mine to the focus knob of the microscope. He showed me how to fine-tune the focus until every bristle seemed a mighty spike, and every internal organ in the creature’s transparent body could be seen to writhe and pulsate. I was mesmerized.
“Daphnia,” he said quietly. “A water-flea.” And then he was silent, and I knew he was savouring the moment, watching with his own calm delight as a child of three discovered a whole new world in a drop of water. As the days passed, he taught me about them all: the strange Paramecium who wandered this way and that, like a lost torpedo, guided by a thousand tiny cilia; the grotesque Amoeba who swallowed other creatures whole with a bulge of its body, engulfing them in slime; and the strange, stalked Vorticella, their mouths shaped like plumbers’ plungers, gaping for food. For weeks, my whole life seemed absorbed by this world in miniature, and populated by its unearthly monsters. My father’s hand held mine as we drew them in pencil: a father and his son, both filled with the wonder of discovery, as if we were the first scientists in the world.
Photograph by Leslie Watson, 1971.