The Blood in Wineglass Bay 1

                 “Nothing is softer or more flexible than water, yet nothing can resist it.”
                                                                                                           Lao Tzu


Water. I keep coming back to Tasmania. Most of those who carved its history only wanted to escape, but I kept coming back. It was elemental. Water and wind and earth and fire. But water first.
Robyn and I returned to Tasmania just over a decade after our banishment by the Medical Council bureaucrats, for the sin of having not attended one of the imaginary schools on their register of recognized epicenters of higher learning. Mr. Lemon was likely long gone, and the scotch-slugging president gynecologist had likely perished in the delirium tremens horrors in front of him.
Familiar faces met our reemergence. Debbie and JB, Robyn’s sister and brother-in-law, also a decade older, greeted us in the arrival hall of the Hobart airport. Their two children, little Kate and Ryan, had stayed at home in Montagu Bay, with JB’s elderly mother, Win. We laughed and hugged each other, the reunion closing the gap of elapsed time in only minutes. Robyn told them of our visit to Jules and Mark in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales, just a few days earlier. Julie had been traveling with Robyn when I first met her in Pakistan, and both her and Mark, and his big handlebar moustache, had welcomed me to Sydney, on my first touchdown in the Antipodes. And now they had received us at their wooden shack in the wop-wops, tall tin chimney, corrugated iron water tank and matching roof, and a ballet of giant red kangaroos bounding through their property at dusk.
We drove through the brick bungalow edges of Hobart, across the kilometer-long Tasman Bridge, to the eastern shore of the Derwent. I looked over the side, 200 feet down, where the motorists, who had found out too late that the white line had gone, had also gone, over the gap in the old bridge, created by the pylon collision of the bulk zinc ore carrier, Illawara, and into the watery whirlpool of death below. Of the twelve people killed, five had been occupants of the four cars that drove off, and seven had been crewmembers, trapped and crushed by falling debris. Two drivers managed to stop their vehicles at the edge, but not before their front wheels had dropped over the lip of the bridge deck. They balanced on their automatic transmissions, until they were rescued. Although the loss of life was less than it could have been (it was a Sunday night), the social debonding and isolation that hit the communities of Hobart’s eastern shore, took a toll anyway. In the six months after the disaster, neighborhood quarrels and complaints rose 300%, crime rose 41%, and car theft rose almost 50%. On the western side of the Derwent, crime rates fell.
Squeezed in between Rosny, Rose Bay and Lindisfarne, Montagu Bay was named after one of the usual type of political picaroon that had administered the early days of the penal colony. Algernon Montagu was known as a quarrelsome ‘Mad Judge,’ before he was himself exiled to Sierra Leone, finishing his days with more scandal, a Creole mistress, and two illegitimate children.
The bay named after him had a boat ramp and jetty, filled with yachts at anchor. The trans-Derwent swim, a difficult crossing of almost two kilometers, in incredibly strong currents, began from here. We passed a boatbuilding shed from the early 1920s, and the Clarence War Memorial Pool, covered with a white inflatable bubble. Montagu Bay was fed by a freshwater creek, whose aboriginal dialect word for it, meant ‘drinking place.’