S Sorrensen
Wooyung. Friday, 12.25pm
The Gold Coast-style development oozes south from the border, swamping the villages of the Tweed Coast one by one: Kingscliff, Bogangar, Hastings Point and Pottsville.
Roundabouts and plastic playgrounds spring up, and shiny cars park in formal neatness outside new cafes spiked with branded umbrellas. Behind the carparks with their overflowing plastic bins full of plastic rubbish, suburbs sprout, the four permissable colours of roof tiles just visible over Zincalume fences.
Like a garish tide, it comes, following the Tweed Coast Road south, ever south, the banks of Cudgen and Mooball creeks now lined with brick veneer, the bush overrun by dogs and littered with plastic shopping bags.
But just south of Pottsville, where the Tweed Coast Road turns away from the coast and heads inland to the Pacific Highway, is a long stretch of beach, less touched by the wheeze of espresso and more still echoing to the ancient songs of the Midjungbal people. Wooyung.
Native vegetation lines the beach, not yet replaced by neat parks with mown lawns and concrete walkways. Wooyung has a small cleared area behind the dune where people can park their cars. There are three cars here. Workers in fluoro shirts and heavy boots sit on the dune. They drink Coke, smoke cigarettes and stare at the ocean.
At my feet, native grasses vie for space among greasy McDonalds bags, plastic Coke bottles, crumpled cans of Tooheys New, plastic straws, and piles of cigarette butts.
In my car I have an empty cardboard box. I fill it with the rubbish. The blokes (yes, the fluoro five are all blokes) look at me. I smile at them. One smiles back.
Down the beach, to the south, a woman is huddled over something. She doesn’t move. What is going on? Maybe someone has drowned. Or fainted. (I hope not; I never did do that first aid course.) The blokes seemed unconcerned. There’s talk of Wednesday’s footy.
I stash the rubbish in my car and walk down the beach.
The woman hears my approach and looks up. She has tears in her eyes.
Her right hand is holding the flipper of a dead sea turtle. Blood is dripping from its mouth. Its head is huge, swollen. Through a small hole in its shell, gas bubbles out.
There are seven types of marine turtles in the world; all are threatened or endangered, thanks to a greedy and inefficient fishing industry, pressure on nesting sites, and plastic.
Plastic. There is so much plastic in the oceans that sea turtles cannot avoid eating it. It chokes them. Or it creates noxious gases in their gut which affects their buoyancy and they’re unable to dive. They starve.
‘I think it’s a green sea turtle,’ I say, noting its size, the curvature of its shell, the single claw on its flipper.
The woman says nothing. She sits on the sand, weeping.
‘It may have died naturally of old age,’ I say. I don’t want her to cry. Green sea turtles live to about 80.
The woman doesn’t speak. She’s not just crying for this turtle. She’s crying for an ocean of sadness: for the five great gyres of plastic in the oceans, for the marine species that go extinct every day, for the acidifying seas, for the threatened coral reef, for the smug vandalism of corporations, for the idiocy of politicians, and for the appalling apathy of the socially mediated.
‘Yes, I reckon it might have died naturally,’ I say, desperate for a happy ending, wanting relief from the grief, craving a numbness to the painful reality.
The woman looks at me with wet eyes, and smiles sympathetically. There is no happy ending.
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