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 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.

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.

It seems so often these days we find seasons creeping in, both ways. Like the hotter times of a month ago reappearing, lasting longer. Or the cooler times of some months ahead, arriving already, premature. The hotter summer days of birak in the time of bunaru. The cooler change and rain of Djeran, also Bunaru.

I am not so interested in ‘thru’ hiking, or it’s relative polarity of ‘section’ hiking. I feel like thru hiking’s contrast is not in hiking some smaller section at probably the same pace or attention, but rather a polarity of this very activity of passing through something that stands as a kind of mere background to our own activity. I seek instead the polarity of ‘into’ hiking—not passing through something, inattentive, but rather passing into something, wideawake—in this case nature. (And finding there, eventually, one’s-self, mirrored back. But I seek not to experience myself directly. It is nature I seek to find.)

The temptation for ‘thru’ hiking 
must surely come
when one grows sufficiently 
uninterested
in the 
‘turning round’.

I went today to the recently burned area of Kartagarrup King’s Park and walked along the paths between the burned and unburned land. Some trees were lost—I spotted a banksia. But many were coming back—sheoaks shooting new, stick-like leaves, banksias bearding all along the stem and branches, marri’s flowering white, oblivious, xanthorea and wisteria coming back from the ground below. The understory groundcover so much clearer than the bushy and leaf-covered otherside of the path. And then, next to a marri, a red-flowering gum—distinct at this time of year amongst so many trees flowering white and yellow, like the marri, the paperbark, the ilyarrie, the tuart, even tea trees here or there. But here the red flowering gum stood, seemingly unaffected by the red of the fire that had just been—that would also have been somewhat orangelike, like the fruiting flesh on the Zamia seeds seen earlier this morning in Bold Park. The red of the tree’s small flowers falling also to the blackened ash of the ground, which still smelled like burnt earth—the dropped flowers a new red on the land, similar to the tail of karak the red cockatoo that now flies over, or the ones a moment ago seen on a nearby pine post, large headed and black as coal, with a tail of fire-orange to red, alive and burning. And then, above, moving amongst the flowers of the red-flowering gum, both on the burned side of the bush and the other, a group of birin birin rainbow bee eaters doing exactly that, beaks full, alighting on dead branches high up, from time to time, to eat or sometimes bash their bee-food, before swallowing. This smaller bird is all rainbow colourful and long beaked, the first ones I think I’ve ever seen, shooting through the trees with seemingly symmetrical triangular like wings, though not as quick as the white, yellow, black flash of bandiny the New Holland honeyeater. The bee-eaters sing together, and remind me of cicadas or crickets chirping, and the whole country sounds alive. And then, finally, into the scene lands noolarga the black-faced cuckoo shrike, all white-grey, except for his sooty visage, here to deliver something. I sing a little. He moves away. Then comes back. A messenger, or so I’ve been told.