Arriving at the turning of this river this day, where the sandbar has been made with the flowing in and flowing out of tides, we find a splashing of water, a flying-hopping of pelicans, a movig dark cloud under the water where the white of the sandbar should be. And then we see the fins coming up through the water, many fins, tails too, a foaming and a thrashing, and soon, fish flying through the air. There are no seagulls in the fray, no crested turns spotting above. It is just a barely-moving throng of dolphin, pelican and mullet, probably. The dolphin fins move above the water, resembling the movement of sharks—about 11 fins in total—but only because the water is so shallow. A few days ago there was a brawl of young men here as part of ‘Australia Day’ celebrations. But today the dolphins, with the mullet and the pelicans, are taking it back. Brawling in their own way; passing though a real life and death moment. Some of the dolphins are right in the middle of the fray, pushing the pelicans out of the way as they pass through at speed, or turn and thrash about. One or two other fins sit a bit further away. And eventually a smaller group moves off, a mother with calf that jumps through the air landing upside down, full white-pink belly showing. They go with another, making a pod of three, leaving a further seven or eight in the slowly swirling mass behind. Every now and then a dolphin will shoot out to the side, or shoot back in, moving swiftly through the water, its fin showing, unable to dive any lower. And then in one sploshing moment, a fish—poor mullet presumable-–is hoisted by the flicking tail of a dolphin through the air for some metres to land with a splosh, lucky not to land in the open mouth of one of the two pelicans, which come flapping-spearing in with their beaks, trying to pick the odd one off.

“They’ve been there for an hour and a half,” a fellow watcher says. “The fish aren’t moving much,” I say, “I guess they’re frozen stiff.” “Stunned mullet,” my wife offers. We walk a little further on, and come across another watcher further up the cliff. “Did you see that one go flying through the air?” he asks, as another does the same. “I’ve never seen them do this here, only in the Murray.” I’ve seen them do similar things with fish (though not the tail flick) by rocks just upriver and downriver, but never on the sandbar, where I have seen them cross without diving, but not coralling-hunting like this—a kind of circling and then a shooting through. The pelicans seem to get pushed further out. Some seaguls flap around, turns begin to circle as a small dinghy anchors nearby to watch, and the kayak paddlers stroke a little closer. Everyone is watching. We move further downriver and see some nankeen night heron pushing further south, but everything else seems a little less…well…spectacular. We tell some others about it. They move to Harvey Beach and watch with us at water level, an hour after we first saw them, the fins still protruding above the surface: fins protruding, tails protruding, everything that usually belongs to the up-down movement of the depths risen to stay for longer stretches this day on a frothing foaming surface—the same as Australia Day brawling maybe—though perhaps with a little more purpose…(though I won’t say ‘porpoise’).

I see that in far-northern-hemisphere winters the rivers narrow and recede. I imagine it’s because of the freezing of water further up, and the rain turning to snow. In the far north, rivers ‘dry out’ in winter. Here, of course, it’s the summers that bring the thinning—dry earth baking under the southern sun. Here the rivers dry in summer—which is that same time as winter in the far north. Summer here is the far northern winter, and vice versa, with rivers in these places all drying out at the same time on earth. 

But it’s not just the rivers. Extreme heat and extreme cold carry similar challenges. We stay inside in the heat of the day; those in the north in the cold of the night, or the cold of the day. In summer, so much here is dying, dead, hibernating. In the north, that’s the quality of winter. Here, in autumn and (to an extent) winter, then spring, we come out again (though some stay out in summer), when things are greener. Like the way the north comes out in summer. 

Yes, there are polarities and balancing; but also, strangely, we’re often doing the same things at exactly the same time.

From the top of nearby hill we see first one fin then another then several—seven—rising up then going under, peeling off from the southern edge of the sandbar below, moving diagonally downriver into deeper water. We watch them rise, invdividually, collectively, for a while. Then we scamper slowly, unrushed, down the limestone edge of the hill, moving through balga and tea tree, until we get to the road below, following it downhill to the river’s edge, flanking the water police, and moving slowly along the jetties, keeping one eye on the surface of the river. We walk all the way to the final jetty by the hotel, and still see no sign of them. We walk right out to the end of the boats, looking upriver and down, the wind here choppy and blown, and still no sign of them. I think I see a moving dolphin-sized bubble blown under water at one point, but nothing emerges. We walk back the way we came, resigned to what we’d seen already today. 

And then, as we get beyond the hotel to the apartments upriver, we see a rising in the calmer waters closer to shore. And then another. But, for the first time I think I’ve ever seen, the rising is not followed by a going under. The dolphins have come up and are floating. They sit above the the water, one or two even raise their heads up higher and look around. What are they looking at or for? Humans? Here in the calmer water of the jetties are dolphins on the surface water, floating, resting, looking around. Here are creatures of the depths that rise, coming up to the surface, going that far, then looking even higher.

It’s only when we see small fish like whitebait or even blowfish by the river’s edge that we notice most of the time there are no fish there; they’ve come up out of deeper water. It’s only when we see bigger fish like mullet chasing white bait that we realise most of the time they’re in deeper water chasing smaller fish usually there. And it’s only when we see the largest water animals like dolphins that we realise we are seeing here something of the very depths now rising, chasing fish from slightly higher waters, who were maybe chasing fish from slightly higher waters still, until they’re all present at the shoreline edge. The whole gradation of the depths expressed. 

Elsewhere we might see even finer shifts, like the workings of sealions, sharks and whales. Different-sized whitebait. Other fish of varying ranges. Those that swim the surface, mid range, depths. Those that cross those lines. Everything has a lawful place. Everythign fits. Smaller shoreline crabs, for instance, we half expect, but what a suprise when we see a larger one emerging from the shadowed depths as we go walking by.

And so it was this day, looking down where usually its sand or some blowfish floating on the tide, and see instead the form of the will-filled, life-filled darkened depths given form and speed and strength in dolphin chasing the mullet pinned against the limestone wallings—the fish one form, schooling, though broken into bits when the dolphin strikes and hits. The mullet, out of his depths, pressed, by the upsurging will of life, against death.