They say when you are dying, your life flashes before your eyes.
I was dying, and the life which flashed by was no ordinary one. Here I was, not far below the ocean surface, tied to the bottom by a rope around one foot, when it all vividly returned.
My good mate Turk and I had gone spearfishing, on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and were 80 km offshore.
After anchoring the speedboat, we swam off, one on either side of a reef; with a snorkel, flippers, and speargun, Attached to the guns were 30m cords with a float on the far end. Thus, once a fish was speared, it was threaded onto this cord, and let drift back to the float. The reason being to keep them at a distance, in case any sharks were hungry.
However the unexpected happened. On spearing one fish, it twisted several times, which spun the tip off my spear. I came up for air, dived back down 10m, and there was the tip on the sand, the other side of a coral overhang. I swam through, picked it up, started to ascend, and Wham, was jerked to a halt by the cord; which had become tangled around one ankle, and held under the ledge by its float on the far side.
To panic was to drown quicker, and with limited air in my lungs, was sure this was the end – but still began to unwind the cord as my mind drifted.
“Such a silly way to die, tied to the bottom, with air just up there, and what a long journey it’s been since that tent.”
..oOo..
After living my first 3 years in a tent way out on the NQ Mitchell river, our family wandered south to the small towns of Dimbulah and Tolga, where I had the usual fights on the first day. There would always be some bully trying to stand over any new boy, so you just had to front that. The one at Tolga was a humdinger, as was Dimbulah, where we ended up down in a muddy ditch, still going at it hammer and tongs.
The best fun at Tolga was we discovered an abandoned Army dump from the war, and naturally commenced blowing up all sorts of things with bombs, hand grenades and such.
That all seemed fairly ordinary. How-some-ever what did shock us, was when someone explained the facts of life.
Stevie Noonan and I were horrified, imagine men and women doing that!
It seemed a good deal more way out than exploding old hand grenades, so we regarded the bloke who explained it, as someone with a truly weird imagination.