Neville Peat - Coasting: The Sea Lion and the Lark

At Taieri Mouth, south of Dunedin, there is a new presence riding the breakers in. I want to describe it and define it. I want to try to understand it.

N EVILLE P EAT
Broad Bay

BIG ROCK CORNER, at Brighton, is a milestone on the road to Taieri Mouth. No, it is more than a milestone. It is a threshold. Approaching from the Dunedin side, you negotiate a U-turn around a bluff high above the crashing sea. The world seems to spin. You feel at the edge of somewhere special, and when the spinning is over it looks too good to be true. Immediately below, threatening to excite a vertigo attack, is Brighton Beach, hemmed in by cliffs on the near side and a river on the far side. No matter how many tiny figures are distributed on the beach, it always appears to be a private sort of place a snug fit for the sea. Even lines of surf caress the sand. Beyond the quiet river is a giant billiard table a footy field in reality, the Domain. Cliffs of crumbling clay and schist bedrock elevate the Domain above river and sea, a green tongue licking water that is effervescent and salty on one side, and dark, sluggish and brackish on the other. With no estuary to relax into before submitting to the sea, Brighton River moves sullenly and reluctantly to its destiny. Its mouth is nondescript, mostly a dribble of water crossing the sand and stained the colour of tea. Sometimes the sea closes the mouth completely and the brew thickens.

The backdrop to the bay contains houses new, old and refurbished, the newer ones having been enticed by favourable council rates and a gorgeous outlook. Only a few holiday cottages remain where once they were cheek by jowl, a picture of summer bonhomie. Called cribs this far south in New Zealand, they used to be shuttered up for months on end awaiting a rush of blood known as the school holidays. The cribs speak of a time when petrol was cheap and society homogenous, and when you went to Brighton for a dip in the sea. Bikinis were just starting to make an impact. It was fashionable for the blokes to slick Brylcream through their hair. It kept their hair glossy, even after a dip.

This is where my coasting began. For a youngster growing up on the other side of the coastal hills at flat, featureless Mosgiel, a trip to Brighton was an adrenaline adventure. It was another country. Big Rock corner, the border, made my heart jump. It still does. Forty years on, I go back and kick the creamy-grey sand, suck in salt air tainted with rotting bull and bladder kelp and cross a memory threshold. The fifties were full of endless summers. Bottler days. Corkers. Especially Saturdays. You could rely on it to be fine, my mother would say, looking back. From Mosgiel, Brighton was two short bus rides away, and it added to the excitement to have to swap buses at Green Island.

My father, Ernie, never came on these trips. He coveted fresh water. Whenever we went to Brighton, he would head for the Taieri River or some other inland waterway with a fishing rod and a tin of worms dug up squirming from the garden for bait. I never saw him in bathing togs.

Yet, despite the fact that we went different directions, we shared an interest in the tides. If Dad intended fishing the tidal lower Taieri River around Henley he needed to know what the tide was doing at Taieri Mouth and how it would affect the feeding routines of trout and flounder. The Brighton expeditions were also tidally driven. We beach-goers had to coincide with low tide. We might stay at home otherwise. At Brighton, low tide exposed rock pools by the acre to the south of the surfing beach. The pools were fantasy worlds in miniature. And they were worlds apart, each uniquely designed, decorated and inhabited. Cockabullies ruled. We would pile on to the bus at Mosgiel with togs, towels, sunhats and sandwiches and numerous jars with screwtop lids for catching the large-headed little fish. We started going fairly regularly to Brighton when I was six years old. Mum would take my younger brother, Russell, and I, and our similar-aged cobbers from over the road, Frankie and Nan Burrell plains kids on a marine mission. The New Zealand Railways Bedford bus, whose dark-green vinyl seats would stick to the backs of our legs on a hot day, let us out at the bottom of the hill below the Big Rock. We usually had one thing on our minds. We would make straight for the rock pools after selecting a picnic spot at the edge of the marram grass backing the broad apron of sand. We would leave our food, clothes and other possessions there unguarded. Safe as houses, they were. Nothing ever went missing.

If the weather was uncommonly hot we might head for the surf first, but mostly we went hunting cockabullies in the hope of giving them a bus ride home. We also sought catseye shellfish with the passion of gemstone hunters, and loved watching their jade-green doors swing shut when they were plucked, squirting, from the pools.

A tide island protecting the main beach from southerly swells was the first island I ever stepped on. I have been intrigued by islands ever since. Flat and grassed on top, Barneys Island had a deep natural trench through it, dark at the bottom. We waded the channel if the tide was half in, or leapt across. My mother never ventured over. It added to the mystery of the place to be rid of our adult escort.