early morning treasures from the sea:

On the beach, a strange blob: bright turquoise-with-black-leopardskin-markings. Is it part of a fish, with it’s head recently bitten off? Or maybe a sort of squid?

A couple of kids and a woman  join me standing around this mysterious sea-tossed  thing.   We stare down at it.  A treasure laid out  on shiny fresh washed sand. The ocean ruffles her white petticoats  besides us. Joggers thump past. 

After thirty years walking up and down this beach I can still be surprised - and often am - when the ocean casts something ashore  that I have never seen before. Its a cuddle fish says one of the little kids, poking it with a thong. We flip it over. Yes, she’s right, some sort of squid, milky white underneath. Then a wave tosses it over again. The creature is still pulsing faintly as its  colour fades.

I continue on my walk, up the beach to the National Park. My bare feet negotiate the narrow track, careful of rocks and tree roots.  I sit on the high cliff top. Wind rattles the banksias and  shakes the she-oaks. The ocean thrashes on the rocks below. All this agitation, but the sun warm and steady and the birds tweetlling cheerily  in the bushes. 

I see whales. There are a  couple of them flapping about and spouting and waving their flippers and tails and thwacking up great white splashes in the dark blue halfway to the horizon. I am  comforted  to know they are living their lives out there in the ocean-world. Doing what they do every year, making their journey north from Antarctica. Giving birth at Platypus Bay up near  the northern end of Fraser Island. 

Once I was on a tourist boat up there and a couple of whales came right up to us. The boat turned off  its motor and there was a sudden peaceful silence as we rocked with the waves. A  sort of time-warp enchantment seemed to settle on us all. The great ocean creatures nudged our vessel. We had eye-contact. We humans lost track of time. Finally the whales  swam off  and we returned to normal consciousness. The whales I saw this morning would be heading back south to Antarctica with their calves for summer.