Sunburnt Speculations

A Josip Novakovich exercise in describing the setting for an event connected to an item in a home in which I grew up. The item I’ve selected is a Jarvis Walker ‘Little Jim’ fishing rod.

For readers not familiar with fishing Queensland’s Gold Coast in the late 1950s, Jarvis Walker was an Australian fishing rod manufacturer. The Little Jim model was solid fiberglass and about 4 feet long. I received it for my fourth birthday. It was often sold as a child’s rod but was quite serviceable as a boat rod. I still have it and, over the years, have handled some quite decent fish on it.

But this passage is not about the fishing rod – not directly so anyway. I’ve taken the name “Little Jim” and given it to “Christy”, whom we have met before. So, for this exercise, Little Jim is an imagined person. Old Harry is also a person – a real person, who first helped Christy to set up his fishing rod.

As to what happened on Christy’s first fishing trip – in heavy surf, with a four-foot rod – well that is another story entirely! But let’s begin to set the scene.

Little Jim climbed onto the couch and watched through the sunroom window of the fibro cottage on top of Rikar Hill, overlooking the sweep of Clangatoona Bay to where, on a clear day, he could just make out, twenty miles away, the high-rise buildings of Cudgalong Beach– some of them eight stories tall!

He watched the ocean swells burst into white foam on the outer sandbanks – gathering again in the deep blue-green gutters and exhausting themselves on the sand. He could hear them from the cottage when his ears went searching for them amongst the always present soundscape of the surf. He would search for the boom and the hiss of them. And he could smell the salt when the wind blew in from the northeast, bringing the blue-bottles.

But today the wind blew south-easterly and that was good because it brought the fish close in to the gutters that ran north from the sheltered water behind the point.  

He watched the sun dip towards the rain forest, and he knew that it would not be long before Old Harry, carrying his salt and blood-stained wicker creel, with his deep-bent bamboo surf rods balanced over his shoulder, would crest the hill on his daily trek down to the beach to fish.

So, Little Jim watched. He watched for Old Harry.

“Little Jim” – the fishing rod – today