Adding to the red of this time of year, I find also a red-flowering paperbark by the western edge of the lake; as well as some pink gums at the northern edge, and to the east. The bootlebrush are already appearing; plus more distinctly-red flowers by the river. They are all opening red to the burning of the sun made more this way by the smoke of fires at the end of the day.
Author Archives: jbstubley
The Wall is Breached!
The cliff wall formed along the beach last Tuesday morning has now been breached. It took not a storm from the west with the force of seas and swell to over-run it, but merely a bout of higher tides with peak south moon, and some usually strong afternoon sea breezes—and now the sand castle is breached. The once one-metre-high clifftop wall is now a 45 degree even ramp—a launching pad up to the crest and then general decline of the limestone sand behind it, followed by another rise to the dunes and first plants behind that. And with rain and clouds this morning we get the first taste of what will be coming, all too soon.
Water Stops Itself
I visited the beach this morning for the first time in what might have been weeks. And I was surprised to find a one-metre-high cliff wall along the water line. It stretched along the southern part of the beachy bay, then broke gradually up into bay-ridge type mounds in the middle of the bay, before gradually, generally, flattening out into the far distance. The wind this morning is a gentle south easterly; the water comes in generally from a south western angle. I think back over the past days and weeks—no high swells or seas—a storm on the weekend, but the wind came in from the east, offshore, rather than driving the waves higher up the beach. And so the water, on lower seas and swell and (mostly) wind and tides has made for itself, with the sand it pushes up, a kind of barrier to stop its own advancing higher. It has made a kind of new dune line closer to the ocean—about 50 metres closer than the current one.
And I can only assume it will stay this way, until a storm comes in from the south west bringing wind and seas and swell (or a sufficiently high afternoon tide with south west wind behind) to throw the water in waves up over whatever walls it has placed so far in its own path, and so advance further up the beach. And with a general rising of the world’s waters, and an increase in more extreme weather, the general shoreline will keep invading further inland, as much as the water itself seeks to stop its own advance—seeks to keep itself in place, seeks to maintain a healthy interaction with land—a central part of the ecosystem which it itself with many others has made.
Noonlyarak and the Honkeynut
Not only does the marri eucalypt honkeynut seem made for noolyarak the white tailed black cockatoo, but it is even more specific. It is made for the beak of noolyarak. But more specific still. Of the two species of the large black bird, only one has a long beak made specifically for marri and karri nuts. The other—with shorter beak—can eat many things. Both are endangered.
A very specific meeting of one species—one part of the high sky above—with its very specific beak; one part of heaven coming down and connecting with one very specific part of earth below. Baudin’s Noolyarak and the Marri honkeynut. No generalities. No abstractions allowed.
Hiking and The Zone
Hiking with a heavy pack, it’s easy to slip into a mindless one-foot-after-another, not really noticing everything that’s passing by. Some find this to be a zone of quieting the mind. For me, I try to resist it, and resist it with all my might. Yes, the mind can become quiet, but it must then be filled with some kind of content. And the content I seek is the world around—nature; society. If my mind slips away from this, what it perceives is not really for me or anyone really, but only kind of me. I seek insight. Into the world around. And that means staying present, staying awake to what is moving by, moving through. Not greedily grasping, but staying with—with a focussed then open attention. This is the difference. And so walking with heavy pack, or any labour really, can be a good training for this—a good training of constantly bringing one’s self back.
Birin Birin Again
After not having seen birin birin the rainbow bee eater for my first forty-four years, I’ve suddenly seen them in three places in the space of three weeks. But isn’t that the way with things? First we might hear a story, and in so doing develop some kind of organ for potentially seeing, then one day we see something, and our rudimentary organ must then fit and adapt to what is being seen—we now have a more developed birin-birin sense organ—somethign to see the orange head and green chest and other rainbow colours of balanced triangular wings and longer beak ready to catch bees and other insects, forming themselves into somewhat swarming groups, not unlike the bees they seek, making a stange kind of cricket or cicada-type chirp. First at Kartagarrup Kings Park, then at a pool on Bilya Madjit the Murray River near Dwellingup, and then again today near Perry Lakes—all of it Bunaru second summer before, I’m told, they’ll head north once more. Birin birin organs forming. And one cannot help but wonder what other unformed organs lie in waiting—what other things are we not seeing, humanity?
Bush
Upon giving my wife three options for our first easing-into overnight hiking—7kms, 11kms or 14.5kms—35 degrees, up and down hills, extreme fire danger slightly lessened, total fire ban lifted overnight, but still windy, still hot, still end-of-summer dry, thunderstorm with 40mm of rain expected overnight—she decides on the 14km option. ‘An adventure!’ she says. We drive out to where the 1000km-long trail intersects with some forgotten road just past a river crossing of not much water, and throw our packs on, before drinking as much of our spare water as possible. And then we step off, thinking the trail will wind somewhat gently, easily, gradually along the river and we can stop for swims whenever we feel we need it. The track is loud with dead, dry leaves, dug up by the rummaging of wild pigs, splattered with the squashed flat-caked droppings of emus, painted white under trees where black cockatoos have eaten, covered in nuts and branches at the same, lined with what I think is called hazel and occasionally bracken, all tall, thin and the same size—a kind of invasive native opportunistic post-fire plant—the burned trunks of the jarrah and marri and blackbutt trees recording when the last fire went through, some dead, balgas happy, jiragee the zamia (often a victim of the borer’s/boarer’s digging I think), the occasional banskia. And whenever we get a glimpse above the hazel we can see down to the river’s lighter green leaves of tuarts, and the thinner light green of the paperbark leaves, maybe a vision of the white-dry bank, a dark pool here or there in spots, and the valley rising again on the other side. The sun blares on, the pack gets heavier even though we drink them lighter. We decide to push through to the river on a side path and see if we can walk up it for a while, at which point we cross the path we thought we were on, reach the river— bone dry—and follow it a while downstream. Water appears, dark and still, and then grows, wider and wider, as our choices for walking grow thinner and thinner, until we’re bashing through branches on the edge of the bank, large pools of water awaiting our missteps. We push on following a kangaroo trail, up and down, and then eventually come to another trail out. We swim first and eat, then push our way through hazel and spiky wattle and other thin shrubs back onto the trail, where we now have to step over logs, dodge the endless overhanging branches, keep an eye out for snakes, listen to the sound of the occasional mammal scattering through the bush—sometimes kangaroo, sometimes maybe emu or pig. Fantails come with us. Red tailed black cockatoos karak and encourage us along. It’s hot. The occasional wren. A ring necked lorikeet. Gravel and the odd pile of granite, or a rounded granite outcrop. Up and down, a road, a dry creekline or two that in winter would be wet. We find another river entrance and swim again, with birin birin the rainbow honeyeater flying overhead. Some afternoon tea on the stove. And then we climb and climb, along a ridgeline looking west, then down, down, knowing what tomorrow will bring. The end, some six hours after starting, moves from in front to behind us on our map—we go back to look—nothing, only to find it was just beyond where we’d turned around. A hut on the trail. We swim again, set up the tent, break out the stove and cook with the sunset pink in the sky. I wake in the dark, expecting rain around midnight. The wind has picked up, thunder, lightning, a little rain, but not much, then all is quiet. Morning brings stillness. We re-pack. More thunder, some clouds pass by. A tickle of rain as we shove the last of our things in. And then retrace the whole thing in reverse. And I wonder what we’ve learned. Maybe a few things. Maybe just this: the imagination is the bridge from a science of the material to a science of the immaterial. And that I think I prefer hike-in camping to long-distance hiking. It is not the walking with heavy things on the back which is appealing, but the insights into nature which both we and nature require.
Satellites
Sitting under clear-yet-treed nighttime camping skies we look up the long trunks of them to the blinking of the stars above. And right where Orion has done up his belt, right where the snout of nyingarn the echidna pokes into the black holes of space looking for ants, a friend spots a satellite passing through, north west to south east, then another a few seconds later on the same line, then another, then another—a dozen at least in relatively short succession, almost all of them following the same line; same way that the sun and moon and planets all more or less follow the same line, with the zodiac moving more slowly beyond them. Except, here, it is some other line altogether, so much faster, irregular—something man-made amongst nature’s rhythms—rhythms we at first helped fix, and now move and bend to our own will. Where is the lawful next?
There is Cooli!
In the last couple of weeks it’s been the same band of usual suspects as the lake inhales its last dirty puddles. Kwirlam the swamphen, the resident lake shoreline bird, here even when the lake is all but cracked earth and grass. Nolyang the dusky moorhen, smaller than kwirlam, still patrolling some of the shallow pools. The black-winged stilt in twos or fours, still stretching their pencil legs within the water. Wayan the whitefaced heron, larger, patrolling, lurking the expanding plains of the dryer mud between drying pool and encroaching grass. And old sharp-tail aka woody the sandpiper walking small around the edges or the centre here and there, his tail bobbing as he goes, like a little tuft of mud up and given form. But today, an old familiar friend re-appeared—one I’d wondered at whether or not he’d left when the lake began to dry; a smaller type of hen, really, larger than a crake (who I also haven’t seen for days, weeks)—cooli, the buff-banded rail; orange headed and chested with stripy lines to boot, a kind of turtle-shell-coloured brown on his back, slinking through the grasses by the winter lake’s edge, now dry. Cooli who I’d missed. Cooli who’s stayed. (Almost three years since the lake has fully dried.)
Just When You Thought it Was a Sharp-Tailed Sandpiper
How often it seems you’re given a name for something you’ve been seeing regularly—”It’s a sharp-tailed sandpiper,” matching at once the name to the thing in front of you, wedded, known—when you go away for a couple of weeks and return, and think you’ve seen the same old friend as before, small of course, engaging the kind of naked-eye birdwatching that you do. “Old sharp-tail is back,” you proclaim, full of wisdom, to no-one but yourself, and this writing. Only to read in a monthly newsletter today that it is, in fact, a “wood sandpiper” (the article by the same guy who pointed out the initial sharp tail). I can see it in my mind’s eye now, its bobbing tail and short, sharp movements, its almost brown-grey feathers against the greyness of the drying lake. “Old woody is back!” I proclaim, and none could care less, except maybe woody (possibly sharp-tailed), and of course me, for my whole world has yet again changed.
John Stubley 