Wearing wetsuits, caps and goggles, six of us left the beach and swam diving and surfacing through the wave zone before flattening out into rhythm for a quarter-hour until we left the bay and were off the yellow marker halfway to the pier. There we stopped and floated with our goggles on our foreheads, catching our breath, looking back at the hills, rising and falling on the swell while we talked, saying how beautiful it was. The water was clear enough to see the striations in the sand below and rags of kelp rolling past on the tide. The day was silent but for the waves breaking on Australia back there.

Suddenly fish surrounded us; a gathering of fish such as hasn’t been seen since the oceans were mugged by sapiens – silver fish with green-spotted backs, all conjoined by a sinew of reflex so that murmurations ran through their school like wind through high grass. Countless fish, each as long as your forearm with your hand extended, none smaller, none bigger, shaped for hard swimming, but at ease now, nosing about.

The fish came close, just beyond reach, sensing we were too ungainly to be predators. We put our goggles on and swam down among them, the sun roofing the water with warping quicksilver. Down there we were caught up in the epiphany of the numbers that had come swimming out of the past, from the pre-colonial Eden this place once was, from a time when the sea was so full of fish they had to turn in sync or butt heads.

We marvelled in their midst, not even trying to touch them now. I’d been yoked to dark thoughts at night lately, and it seemed the fish were here for that reason. This was the year Putin invaded Ukraine. Certainly, no one believed there were still schools of fish this big in our waters.

None of us wanted to leave the fish and swim on into the present, but the water was down at 12 degrees and no place to hang around for long. We started for the pier, watching the coast slip slowly behind, and we swam through fish the whole way. On the pier the fishermen were abuzz. They could see the fish, the mass of them, and they shouted and swore and changed this bait for that and cast far out among them but couldn’t catch a single one.

When we walked gingerly barefoot up the rotten concrete boat ramp, scalping our caps from our heads and talking excitedly to each other, the men on the pier were angry with us, as if we were in cahoots with the fish and had given them insights into the fishermen’s many ruses and thus denied them their catch.

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“Australian salmon,” an unsmiling man in a greasy parka said to me. “They’re part of a food chain.” It was a way of telling me this was sharky water and I was the type of stupid son-of-a-bitch who’d be eaten and his family would be lamenting and ululating and throwing wreaths off the pier soon enough. “Everything’s part of a food chain,” I replied. “Every fisherman ends up a feast for shit-eating microbes.” I wasn’t about to take any crap from a man who’d tried to murder fish that had been sent for me. The fisherman shook his head to ward off my stupidity.

We drank coffee at The Angling and Aquatic Club at the pier’s end with our wetsuits peeled down to our waists, cold and happy. “Wow. So many.” “Never in my...” We didn’t have words for what it was like to be part of that wide bloom of alien life, nor for the sense that time had slipped out there in the water and landed us in the past, bestowed a privileged glimpse of an age before the depredations of the Anthropocene. We’d picnicked in The Garden, if you will, before the apple was plucked. People we knew kept walking past, but we couldn’t tell them about the fish. We looked at each other, silently agreeing it couldn’t be told. When we swam back to town the water was clear and the sand below us a desert of tiny dunes and the fish were gone.