Catherine Titasey drifted around the world until she was pulled in the current to Thursday Island for a brief visit. Fourteen years later, she's still there and writes and paints to stay sane from the stress and chaos of four children, two step-daughters, a fishing-obsessed husband and his two businesses she manages with no idea of what to do.
We’d been fishing in our little vessel for about six months when I was struck, quite suddenly, by a mystery virus characterised by persistent nausea and lethargy.
I remember the day quite clearly. I was throwing up over the side of the boat in heavy seas, begging T for help. He was shouting with delight as he pulled in the biggest ever mackerel, 27kg. We had our first argument that, to some extent, clarified my position in T’s life vis a vis fishing. Actually, we’re still having that same argument.
My recovery was slow and even my period had switched to TI Time.
When T suggested I could be pregnant, my first thought was, would it be legal to breastfeed a baby while operating a dinghy because I would need to get ashore on my own? My second thought was, would it be possible to breastfeed a baby while operating a dinghy?
The answers are, respectively, "still don’t know" and "yes" (if feeding from the right breast) though it happened infrequently because we soon found ourselves living in suburbia on Thursday Island, as a family, with little T, the ugliest, flat-nosed, bald, bulbous eyed, crooked footed baby boy, but to me he was absolutely perfect and of course, the most beautiful baby ever born.
It was only after I stopped having the most beautiful babies in the world that I realised, from old photos, babies are quite simply ugly. Whether it’s pride, hormones or some bizarre maternal instinct, we have to think them beautiful or we’d probably leave them in someone else’s dinghy.
Suburbia, Thursday Island style, was a small flat no bigger than the vessel we’d just sold. The kitchen was so small I referred to it as "the galley". The space our mattress on the floor occupied, I called "the fo’csle" and the lounge was the "bridge".
We had no stove, no hot water and the bathroom was a shower rose concealed from the neighbours and the cold north-west wind by only a flower-print shower curtain. I remember the pattern well, blue flowers and brown leaves, because I spent most of my showering time holding it in place.
Sewerage had not yet come to TI so there was a thunderbox down the back yard and the night-soil cans (I’ve never understood the connection to the night or soil), rinsed in kerosene, were changed on Tuesdays and Fridays.
We moved to TI when T was born in the wet season, a time of constant heavy rain. Many a rush was made from the flat to the out-house in violent squalls only to discover the frogs, geckos, mosquitoes and cockroaches were taking refuge in the only dry spot, if you didn’t count the leaks in the roof. Every time I went to the toilet, I would have to reestablish my supremacy over these creatures and I always got the better of them … just.
This was not the 1940s, or the 60s. This was the late 90s. As in nineteen nineties.
While the rest of the country enjoyed domestic conveniences, such as internal bathrooms and toilets, screened windows and doors and safe wiring, many Islanders, as opposed to the public servants in departmental housing, did not. Extensive renovations to public housing began around this time thanks to the strong voices of locals who demanded, until someone listened, the same conditions as tenants on the mainland.
We rented privately and as the public lessees enjoyed news of their impending renovations, we had our own special treat – connection to sewerage in October, 1999.
Thereafter, we could visit the "toilet" without competing with insects, reptiles or rain or the omnipresent smell of kerosene. Sometimes, I would settle crosslegged on the closed lid of the smooth white Caroma and read late into the night, just because I could. And I vowed never to take a toilet for granted, now that I finally had one.
