Jackadup, Yaargadup: Jackadder Lake, where the bandits swim

Jackadup, Yaargadup: Jackadder Lake, where the bandits swim
Upon Jackadder Lake the sun sets and shines gold and red till it is replaced by neon night lights from the village shopping centre opposite, bobbing red ripples in the wind wash.
Here on dusk and into the night, the golden bell and banjo frogs sing their night time ballads to the swans navigating and singing overhead. The frogs are their guides to the lake and both sing, when the swan hears the frog, both sing their way to the water.
Without the song of the frog how else might the swan find it?
When I was a child I did as children do. I hunted the edges of that lake for duck eggs. The ducks built their nests above the water line, nests that they dug from the roots of the grass that hung beneath the lakeside turf. And visiting the local delicatessen of Mordini Brothers I collected and fed stale bread to the waiting swans, gulls and coots and stood fearless amidst their frantic feathered fighting and squabbling for scraps.
The extended necks of swans gave the marauding gulls and coots something to fear for tail feathers were often pinched and ripped from extended beaks.
But beyond the squabbling of beaks and flying feathers, hovered half-submerged long-necked hard-shelled yaargeny. The yaargeny are the long-necked tortoise, the namesake of Jackadder Lake (Jackadup, Yaargadup) and below the surface they waited and bided their time.
Once I spied several attacking a seagull. It didn’t stand a chance.
In the shadows cast by the lakeside willows where the long reeds sing with reed warbling songs swam this band of bandits. One attacked, brave from beneath, he attacked the unsuspecting gull unnoticed and another winged that gull and pulled. And then another was biting its now bleeding breast, and that desperate gull trod the water. It struggled in its vain attempts to break free, to find its height before it sank.
I watched the white feather sky dweller’s carcass and fighting form, half-submerged and sinking in the depths as the bandits finished him, until the stillness of water returned to calm him.
In the shallows the white Egret stalks and hunts in silence, scanning the reeds for frogs, tadpoles and gambezi fish. He stands rigid, fixed, and aiming, and like a shot his beak flashes. His spear is thrust and seldom misses.
I too had watched and admired the pinging tail movements of the musk duck. I had once caught some beneath the arching bridge from the stream that fed Herdsman’s Lake. This stream also had openings that fed the east side storm drains from Yaargadup. I wondered if the young musk had been sucked in from that lake and beneath the roads had swum before finding the stream beneath that arching bridge.
All around that lake I found my way.
I once strapped 33 gallon drums together and paddled the raft across one day, and together with friends we trawled and swept the shallows with nets for carp and dragonfly larvae and sucking leech.
But now I am older, I walk with my own children by that lake beneath the willows and teach them the names of ducks and together we watch for the black protruding noses of the black shelled bandits of Yaargadup.
And here that was once a cow paddock was also a horse yard. I find myself thinking of horses, imagining them galloping with tails held aloft, whinnying in their play near the lake. Here in the 1930s my grandfather’s brothers James and Tom acquired a foal from this herd. Its name was Chico and it was here it had received its winning genes.
Here too near this lake white hunters in the 1890s had chased their quarry, a wild kwerr brush kangaroo. Here their hunting dogs had caught her baying and howling along the now unseen fence line and delivered their kill for the men on horseback blowing horns.
But before this time Yaargadup had seen other events, for here bands of wilgied Noongar had wandered in their millennia of coming and going, in skin cloaks and naked in the sun, standing knee deep in the mud hunting yaargeny to cook in the ashes of their smouldering lakeside fires. Others had dug their eggs from the soil, and made their beehive huts where million dollar mansions now stand, where the wealthy watch from their wide glazed windows the silver lines of recreational 4WDrive vehicles, with young families lazing on tartan rugs with prams.
But sometimes I still see the originals. In the trees I still see and hear the wild ones of former days.
The family of magpie still hunt their lands and nest and swoop in spring, and at night I can sometimes hear the mopoke sing.
And recently my daughter and son spied the broken shell of a black baby bandit that some pedestrian’s foot had stepped upon, unseen in their walking. Some other passerby had discovered it, and felt pity for it, the namesake of this lake.
This lake where miniature sails now flap between foam buoys and race and where their owners in rubber suits and wellington boots stand with radio controls for hours.
This lake where red and yellow Ferrari sometimes park and drivers sip coffee, where thousands of feet now tread, and where the lakeside sports equipment sits spaced, idle and waiting.
This lake, the wind still washes from one side to the other the feather down of swans, sea birds and coots, where the musk duck pings in its courtship, with the banjo frog singing: ‘plonk, bonk,’ and guiding the swan.
This lake where I want to cast my shoes aside. Here I want to enter the water once more. I want to hunt duck eggs and fish for the bandits with woollen twine weighted with lumps of meat. No matter how much the yaargeny stink I want my children to know the thrill of their capture and release.
I want my children to fish for carp and wade in the shallows, and to name the birds as I did, but in reality I know they can’t, for nothing is as it once was.
We can’t feed the swans or wade in the water with nets for it is now a nature reserve, nature and bread stuffed ducks are rightly a thing of the past, times have changed, we’ve got to keep the waters calm, except for that lake’s edge frantic in its steps and stepping, with untethered marauding dogs and 4WDrive all terrain vehicles hugging the kerb and ladies with wide-brimmed hats and wide-eyed glasses cramming the shoreline.
But at night as the stampede subsides the peace of Yaargadup returns once more.
When all have left the plonk-bonk song returns to serenade the moon and guide the singing swan. And sometimes I have this Déjà vu that where the bandits swim, I’ve been before and sense I am that child again.