Bull Sharks and Dolphins
Traveling slowly up the east coast toward Brisbane on our annual work trip, we escaped the sweltering heat this morning by working on the banks of the Clarence River in the small town of Maclean. It’s a 7.5-hour drive from Sydney, with five hours left to go before we reach Brisbane.
The Clarence River is Australia’s largest east-coast river, and sleepy villages line its banks, where surfing, fishing, swimming, and salty hair dominate the daily routine. I’ve also noticed that you can hire a houseboat to navigate the river at a leisurely pace.
It’s amazing what you notice when you sit quietly for a long period of time. My first early morning encounter was with a large lizard basking in the morning sun. As soon as he saw me, he quickly scurried back into the water. He was much bigger than the blue-tongue lizard that lives under our house in Melbourne!
Not long after I saw the lizard , a big splash of water caught my attention. I couldn’t believe my eyes when a large fish leapt through the water right in front of me. It reminded me of a dolphin, but its white body and larger frame didn’t quite fit the dolphin image in my mind. A fisherman who’d come to check his net on the nearby jetty, where I’d settled in for the morning, suggested I’d likely seen a bull shark. Apparently, bull sharks are found in substantial numbers in the river. It’s been quite dry lately, and according to the fisherman, the increased salinity in the water due to the lack of rain creates favorable conditions for sharks. Needless to say, there goes the dip I had in mind.
I’ve mostly been working in my sketchbook on this trip. It’s easy to carry around and offers a certain discipline that often gets neglected when I’m at home, where the studio invites larger work with ease. On the road, though, it can be tough for me to find my flow. Just as I started to get into a sketch, another splash startled me, I saw smaller fish leaping into the air trying to escape becoming the next meal for a school of dolphins that swam by!
I could hardly believe my luck!
