Brother Fish by Bryce Courtenay Read Free Book Online Page B

at sea as there were headstones in the churchyard.
    Queen Island, set slap bang in the middle of Bass Strait, is subject to sea mists and furious gales, and over the past hundred years many a sailing ship has been wrecked on our notoriously dangerous coastline. The small fishing craft that met their end smashed against the reefs and cliffs or lost in a sudden storm were simply too numerous to count. Everyone knew fishing was a mug’s game, nevertheless it was the only game in town a poor family could play.
    In those post-Depression years most Australian working-class parents dreamed of their sons growing up to be something a little better. On the island this hope was simply defined in a mother’s prayer: ‘Dear God, please don’t let him grow up to be a fisherman!’ If you couldn’t read or write you could always work on a fishing boat. As a fair number of men on the island fell into this category, including my old man, the cruel sea was how we scraped a precarious and always dangerous living.
    Alf, my old man, was a rough sort of cove, what some might call an ignorant man. But if he couldn’t read or write he wasn’t a whinger or in the least resentful of those who may have been considered more fortunate than him. He’d give you the shirt off his back if you needed it and he’d always provided for his family. Even during the Great Depression when he couldn’t get work on a trawler he’d go out in a skiff and set craypots or bring home a snapper or a couple of bream. Our clothes were made on the faithful table-top Singer from the same sugar bags we used as towels, but I can honestly say Alf saw to it that we never went hungry. He was as honest as the day is long, even though honesty wasn’t a virtue much discussed on the island – it was simply taken for granted that people didn’t steal from each other, and crime against property was thought to be something that happened on the mainland or the big island where people thought they were better than us but whom we knew were a bunch of crooks and shysters, or as my mum would say, ‘People who’ll steal the wax out of your ears to make communion candles’.
    That was the curious thing: while, like us, most of the island’s inhabitants came from convict stock who’d moved in from Tasmania in 1888, there was virtually no ‘conventional’ crime on the island. When we were kids the community did have a policeman who carried the grand title ‘Bailiff of Crown Land and Inspector of Stock’ but whom we all knew as Mike Munro or ‘The Trooper’, who got just as pissed as everyone else of a Saturday night. But if you wanted some documentation done that concerned the law you went to see Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan, the bossy-boots librarian and local piano teacher, who also acted as justice of the peace and who somehow managed to scare every schoolkid on the island and not a few of the dimmer adults into believing that she had infinitely more power than any policeman when it came to matters of upholding the sanctity of the law.
    The words ‘justice’ and ‘peace’ were a powerful combination that came together in our imagination to mean that if there was no peace, then the justice meted out by Miss Lenoir-Jourdan would see it soon restored, with dire consequences for the bloke who’d had the temerity to disturb it. While there appeared to be no immediate evidence that the offender had been punished, we kids sensed this was done in such a deep and covert manner that the offender would carry the inward scars for life and never again dare to repeat the offence. Little did I know at the time that this fearsome justice of the peace was going to have a large influence on my life.
    In other matters where an adult needed sorting out for an undeserved act of violence against a member of the community, if he was a Protestant, his mates saw to it; if a Catholic, then Father Crosby would