S Sorrensen
Byron Bay. Tuesday, 10.40am
She shrieks as she slips off the little rock and into an incoming wave.
Her denim shorts get a dousing as the wave raises the water level from about 30cm to 60cm. (She is not tall.) She regains her footing and stands on tiptoe in a clean, clear sea. She is not used to playing in oceans. The seas near her home far away are not clear or clean and you don’t want to play there.
It’s a shriek of delight.
The pure note of this unaffected, spontaneous shriek is so high that if I were holding a cocktail glass filled with, say, a Singapore Sling, the glass would surely shatter. But Little Wategos Beach is not a drinking hole, despite the bar and umbrellas. The only glass here is in expensive spectacles and camera lenses. The others on the beach – her Japanese classmates, in dry sport shoes and diamanté sandals – continue to happily peer and snap, so I figure there’s been no shattering here.
The high note, though, has alerted them to the wet girl’s predicament. Spectacles and cameras turn to her amid a lighting storm of useless flashes.
There’s something about the non-lexical sounds we make – the shrieks, grunts, groans, laughs, sighs and sobs – that is more honest than words. They are expressions resistant to spin or bias. There’s no language barrier. It’s a universal tongue: the shriek of joy, the cry of pain, the shout of resistance, the sigh of acceptance, the laugh of comprehension, the sob of loss…
And these unpremeditated sounds elicit impromptu honest reactions from others. So a ripple of truthfulness goes out in ever-widening circles from each unworded sound.
Wet Girl’s shriek triggers a response from a classmate who grabs her by the hand, saving a fall.
He shrieks too. Well, it’s not exactly a shriek; his 20-year-old voice will no longer handle the upper register of shrieking. His shriek is more hoot than squeal, more mid than treb, more man than boy. But, despite his manliness not being compromised by an embarrassing and uncool high pitch, his whoop of joy is untainted by rehearsal or agenda. You can trust a shriek or a whoop. When was the last time a politician shrieked?
This morning I made my own spontaneous noise.
I was in a cabin in a Ballina caravan park. (Don’t ask.) My noise was a groan. It was sparked by seeing the prime minister announce funding cuts to health and education. My fault – I don’t have a television at home and didn’t understand the risks involved in channel surfing.
My groan was not created by delight or joy but rather by disgust, a disgust peppered with anger, salted with sadness. The forces which pull the strings of this PM bloke not only pick on the vulnerable seeking asylum, but now have the young and the sick in their sights.
I have met people like him. They exist in all communities. Though they need the community to provide them with a life, they contribute nothing positive. They’re bullies. They’re manipulated by others who have an agenda that runs contrary to the best interests of the community. And they’re cowards.
His script was doctored logic spun with poisoned words which the sick, the young and the scared must swallow. I groaned at the injustice and switched off the television.
I cry over the sickening oceans, the dying reef and the spiked aquifers. (Sniff.)
I fear we’ll lose our shriek of wet delight. (Sigh.) And be reduced to words. (Oh.)
But the groaning and crying of the many is becoming a growl.
And the growl is becoming a war cry.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
