Stingrays

It was long ago on an island in a southern sea. There were bays where stingrays cruised from one side to the other, slowly making their way from blue water into the shallows—dark shapes against the sand.

I was twelve at the time but the sea and its colours are almost as clear today as they were then—the sea and the sand and the stingrays. You harpooned them from a dinghy. After that you cut them open on the beach and took out the liver, and left it to rot in the sun for a day or so, and wrapped it around a hook hung from a buoy in the bay. Night came, and by dawn there’d be a shark on the line. They loved rotten liver. One day a man cut out a ray’s stinger and gave it to me. The leathery integument wore off as it dried. I kept the ivory blade for a paper knife.

So the ray’s liver drew the sharks, and the dead sharks had their fins cut off and dried on racks and then taken across the Gulf to Auckland and sold to the Chinese in the city. We were told the fins were cooked and eaten. This seemed almost as fabulous as the stories told about bird’s-nest soup. To me soup was soup and bird’s nests were something else. Yet that’s what they said.

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It’s sad Steve Irwin died so young. But Germaine Greer’s comment was near enough. He was a bumptious pest who made a living from teasing wildlife. As a website entry warned (and surely Irwin’s producer knew?) “Contrary to popular nature documentaries, it is extremely hazardous to swim directly over, or in close proximity to, a stingray. A flick of the tail is apt to pierce a person's body, and a serious, even potentially fatal, situation is in the offing.”

October 2006