Seal of disapproval: 400kg visitor thinks we’ve missed the big picture

It was still dark when I got to the beach with the dog, but I could make her out well enough to see her black shape turn rigid with threat, trotting high-tailed back and forth, throat rumbling a warning. I thought a kangaroo must be on the sand and dropped to my knees to skylight it against the dawn-blush horizon across the water. No kangaroo. Just a … mound of kelp? Something big and squat. But giving off a dull warbling now. I tied up the dog by the surf club and switched on my head torch. (Try locating and wrangling a dog’s scat in the dark without one. Yes, I am a good citizen.)

It was a leopard seal. A visitor from Neptune, an alien from an ice planet, a cast member of Attenborough’s farthest adventures. It had swum up from Antarctica through some 4000 kilometres of trackless water. When was one of these creatures last so far north?

Perhaps tales of old pristine Australia had passed to it down many generations. “Oh, yes, you can visit the great northern land and rest there, but the air is rudely scented with sap, blossom and smoke, and the birds make a terrible hullabaloo.” If it came ashore in the dark believing sealish folklore of that bygone Australia, it would’ve been suffering a rude shock to be waking in the middle of a town, streetlights aglow, neon words hanging in the air, garbage trucks gunning their hydraulics, lifting bins and creating avalanches of glass.

A leopard seal looks like Voldemort on a winning streak, grinning at its own dark virtuosity. It will kill other lesser seals, but lives mostly on penguins. A weeklong run of easterlies had been washing dead penguins up on our beach and perhaps it had come this far north hunting them. It shat on the beach, and any amateur scatologist with a head torch could see it was mostly penguin feathers.

The seal was three metres long, but seemed such a weak, helpless animal on land, so sluggish and seemingly stranded, that a young bloke came up to me in the twilight and asked if we should help it back into the water. The thing must have weighed about 400 kilos. I told him I was too old for the Paralympics, but if he thought he might triumph as a limb-deficient sprinter, then go right ahead and cozy up to the beast. Then we watched it open its jaws wide enough to fit a rugby prop’s head inside. It was the mouth of a lioness.

When the sun came up people gathered round taking photos and asking, “Whoa, what the hell is that thing?” Which is not what you want to hear when you’ve swum 30 latitudes to be here. So it set off down the beach, a rocking horse on rails of blubber, five metres before resting, then, goaded on by more insults, another five metres. It looked listless and sickly to me, and somewhat affronted to be such a curiosity. We left it there being rudely quizzed as to its ancestry by heavyset folk in leotards who were tethered to pug dogs. I empathised with it. The same has happened to me.

That day the sea’s surface was jagged, raging towards town, so Jenny and Baz and I decided rather than fighting it we’d walk out towards the pier and swim back with the waves, riding head first, face-down like skeleton competitors at the Winter Games. It was an exhilarating waltz of undulations, being lifted from behind, waves occasionally breaking when they had no right to.

As we neared the beach I sighted the leopard seal go past us, snatching baby fiddler rays off the sand. In the water it is an apex predator, a mixture of softness and speed, more or less an al dente Exocet missile.

Its eyes boggled at us as it swam past and I could see it asking itself, “Whoa, what the hell are these things? Are these the perpendicular beasts from the beach? So inelegant here in the real world, so slow, no glide, and their hearts racing anxiously as if this weren’t paradise.”

Weeks have passed since then, and that traveller will be home now, in the last wild place, among the ice floes, the many blues and whites, and the whale song, gloomily telling its kin about the adman’s Aurora Australis that now lights our sky. “Motel. No Vacancy. Open. Closed. Cellarbrations. GAZMAN. Unleaded 186.9. Diesel 206.9. More. Bigger. Growth. Progress.”

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