There were skulls, butterflies, paintings of colored dots that corresponded to pharmaceutical codings and, of course, animal and fish corpses suspended in formaldehyde inside giant glass vitrines.
Bass Assasin and Slug-go soft baits were arrayed alongside Deadly Dick silver jigs and Got-chas; there were slender rubber tubes in fluorescent chartreuse and pink, and Creek Chub and Yozuri lures (the Prada of baitfish imitations) were lying like tiny fish corpses in transparent plastic boxes.
Her community of just a few thousand people is on the frontline of the refugee crisis, and has in the past been reduced to fishing corpses from waters around the island.
At the same time there's a constant undercurrent of danger: a passing face looks murderous; police fish a corpse from the river; a pier explodes in billows of dark smoke.
Hopefully Sochi won't have this kind of chaos: there's a running event for deaf competitors (who can't hear the starting pistol), and a swimming event for people who can't swim ("Well, we'll be bringing you back the moment they start fishing the corpses out").
"Today, citizens go fishing for corpses," he adds.
He finds the body of a murdered young woman shes a member of an Aboriginal community that lives nearby and though he is horrified, he and the other men keep fishing, tethering the corpse to the shore with fishing line and allowing a day and a night to pass before they alert the police.
He does not — who could? — lament the departure of an old, fog-haunted waterway that stank, at the heyday of the British Empire, of an unwholesome combination of sewage and chemicals; a river in which no fish swam and corpses became covered with an ineradicable slime.
Bill Collier, a friend of Ann's who arrived in Indonesia in 1968 and spent 15 years doing social and economic surveys in villages, told me that researchers were told by people living near brackish waterways that they had been unable to eat the fish because of decaying corpses in the water.
Sirk here uses the full range of his technique, from the disorienting profusion of mirrors and frames within frames to cutaway images that comment bitterly, even cruelly, on the situation of the characters: a howling drunk in a death's-head mask who interrupts a couple's embrace; a slow pan from a corpse being fished from a bay to a couple kissing passionately in the backseat of a car.
Behaviours that reduce an animal's exposure to infectious parasites, from hiring cleaner fish to hiding dead corpses, probably evolved to combat the deadly pressure of disease, just as animals evolved camouflage to escape being gobbled up by toothy predators.
