![Balimo canoes]( "Balimo canoes")
BOB CLELAND
IF you look at a map of Australia with Papua New Guinea to its north, and put your finger on Cape York and run it northwards across Torres Strait and the wide mouth of the Fly River, a bit further on you’ll reach the town of Balimo.
In 1960 it wasn’t big enough to call a town. It was a small government station sitting alongside a mission establishment on a promontory projecting into a large, shallow, freshwater lagoon attached to the Aramia River.
All the flat land between the Fly River delta and the Aramia is dotted with many lagoons totalling an area of many square kilometres. The depth of water depends on the season; a collection of large pools in the dry to about three metres in a big wet.
The major aquatic plant here is wild rice. In a good season, the lagoons are almost covered with its lush green. As water levels slowly rise, the rice grows to keep its flowering and seeding heads above water.
Those seeds in the lagoons of the Aramia flood-plain attract what seems like millions of Magpie Geese from their breeding grounds in tropical north Australia.
They make excellent eating. And generations of the resident Gogodala people have developed ingenious methods of catching them to feed their families.
They use many of those age-old skills, and also a very efficient hunting tool – the shotgun.
As Assistant District Officer in charge of the station at Balimo, part of my job was to feed about 20 employees: police, interpreters, clerks and maintenance workers. One of the latter was a good shot with a gun, so I made him the station shoot-man.
Balimo was, and I hope still is, an area prolific with wild life. Water birds, barramundi and other fish, wild pigs, cassowaries, several species of wallaby and other smaller, inedible macropods and rodents. My shoot-man knew his species and would provide the station with good edible game.
When the geese arrived, they were a favourite food. The sweet and tender breast meat was bigger than in the chicken shops of Australia. The thighs were a bit tougher but had excellent flavour and responded well to slow cooking. Back in 1960, geese were not a protected species.
I used to give the shoot-man three 12-gauge cartridges and he had to return to me three cartridges, used or unused. There were times he would arrive back at the station with five or six fat geese on a stick and return the three cartridges to me with only one used. Just one.
‘How do you do it?’ I said to him the first time. ‘Did you use cartridges of your own?’
‘No, Taubada, just one.’
‘But five with one shot ... how do you do it?’
‘I just move around to line up several geese at once, then I shoot them.’
I still couldn’t see how he did it, especially as the birds are shy and will rise straight up in dense, noisy flight if alarmed by anyone coming within 20 or 30 metres of them.
‘Can I come out with you one morning?’
He was reluctant, but agreed when I assured him I was used to the small, one-man canoes with no outrigger and would do as he told me.
I met him at first light. He paddled one of the beautifully made Gogodala canoes hollowed out of a log about 25 centimetres in diameter.
‘It’s a two-man canoe. You sit there and don’t move.’
‘Can I help paddle?’
‘No. Just sit still.’
He took maybe 10 minutes paddling quietly along open channels in the rice to approach an area of clear water where several dozen geese crowded.
With still 50 metres to go, he turned his head to me and signalled Don’t talk; don’t make a sound.
The shoot-man sat down and soundlessly paddled another 25 metres. Both our heads were below the top of the rice. Again he signed Don’t move; no noise and skilfully insinuated himself out of the canoe and into the water without sound or splash.
He held the shotgun high. The water seemed to be little more than a metre deep.
Moving slowly through the rice, barely disturbing it, he went out of my sight. Then I saw his head, rising almost imperceptibly. He made a clicking noise. Click click.
The geese, as one, stretched their necks and looked around. They saw nothing, decided the noise was no threat, relaxed and continued feeding and chuckling amongst themselves.
The shoot-man moved again, a metre or so to his left. Click click. Geese alerted ... then relaxed again.
He did this once more and suddenly I realised he was lining up several geese so he could get them with one shot. Ingenious. No flushing them out first and shooting them on the wing.
The final stealthy rise, shotgun to his shoulder, a slight position adjustment, click click, all the heads on stretched necks. BANG!
Pandemonium! This group, and all the others within half a kilometre, rising vertically upwards with honking alarm calls, wing beats whoomping, sky clouded, sun almost obscured. A most amazing assault on eyes and ears.
The shoot-man waded a few steps to collect three dead geese, snapped the neck of a wounded goose and dumped them into the canoe.
I struggled to express my feelings.
‘That was very clever, good work, four geese eh?’
‘Yes, Taubada. Should be six. I lined up six. Maybe two up there have headache, eh?’
Julie cooked a delicious goose breast casserole that night. Both daughters enjoyed it. Kathryn, the younger, born at Balimo 18 months before, had been weaned partly on goose mince.
The best thing of all is that the geese died of head shots – there were never pellets hidden in the body to break a tooth on.
Photo: A typical channel through the wild rice. Distant trees mark the lagoon’s edge. This canoe can easily carry five people. Our shooting canoe was about three-quarters the length