1930

Then the curved tooth snaps with the tug of rope

in Old Tom’s jaw as the Davidson’s whaling boat

with its Yuin crew is hauled, freight harpooned.

The sharkskin skies have the mind of calamity.

A calf, not yet weaned, has been stalked, orphaned,

chased from the mouth of the Kiah at Twofold Bay.

Iridescent, the haven stretches from Eden to

South head, an oily smell of herring is washed

adrift, coddled and simmering in endless quarrel.

The baleen’s mandible is a fringed sieve, leathery

lips are neatly dissected, syllables of tongue

portioned, the fatty flesh verboten as Native deed.

Understanding is costly. Rib bones sold for collar,

corset, whip. Killer or feeder, tribal elder and kin,

rare milk of dreams, —the pectoral slaps respond

to Koori call, tail fins lathered. Wind stopples cold

on the whaler’s spume-rinsed face—motorised boats

herald progress, shipping lines and wood chip mills.

Sixty fathoms of double coir are dragged out in play.

I can hear rope grind off enamel to a shiny groove,

feel his gums sting, the penetration, a split foreskin.

I see his country, fin keel and genitalia, the sharks

descend. There are photographs of his jaw, divergent,

the crags of his teeth are scales of instinct, force—

museums are white man’s allegory but dreams of killer

and Koori whalers rewrite the past in undercurrents.

Steamships canon-fire harpoons ending the backwash,

 

Norwegian guns cull the pods of hunted Orca spirits,

bathypelagic ancestors. I can taste the words whiten

into thin milk of settler culture, bloodlines turnstiled.

Who would say the rookie cried “What have I done?”

Who speaks of repose as a dry, ancient socket beached

on rock wharves, or as a carcass moored in the bight?

 

Old Tom was one of the best known Killer whales, whose cooperation with Aboriginal and settler whalers in south eastern Australia between 1840 and 1930 came to a dramatic end.

 

Michelle Cahill spent her childhood in the UK and lives in Sydney. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry Review, Meanjin, Wasafiri, Shearsman, and Antipodes. Her second collection was shortlisted in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. She received the Val Vallis Award and the Kingston Writing School Hilary Mantel Short Story Award. She was a fellow at Kingston Writing School and at Hawthornden Castle.