Somewhere near where the granite rocks replace some of the trees, just after rain, you’ll tend to see some puddles forming. We walk the lower trail and drink from the flowers of dripping bottlebrushes. And when I wonder if we’ve brought enough water, that’s when we see the puddles in front of us. The water has been caught by depressions in the rock—flowing down, if puddle is full, to lower ones—whole chains of puddles in some spots. I look for the highest ones in any area, take off my cap, bend down and kiss its surface, sucking through lips as I kiss it. It is clean and clear and fresh, maybe a few quartz pebbles on the bottom, reflecting nothing but clouds and sky and my own bending down to meet it.
Category Archives: Nature Poetry
Beebidup / Mt Lindsay Views to the West
We go on our wedding anniversary. Eleven years. Never been to Mt Lindsay and just went to check it out. Ended up hiking the whole thing. And from all the views on the way up, the way down, and at the peak, the thing that stays with me is the view to the west. So much forrest. Taking a selection, you could say no land has been cleared—all the way to where the sun will set—just the rising up-down of hills and lower areas, Mt Franklin somewhere near the furthest edge. When the sun comes out it casts shadows under the clouds, which blend with the dark green of trees, and sends them moving along the forrest bed. The whole thing is quiet, calm, though still with some wind, and alive. I wonder how many people might currently be in this whole spread of land, and reckon we could probably count them on not too many hands.
It’s a scene I’ll take with me into whatever city is next.
Lights Beach Sunsets
I like Lights Beach, and can’t believe I’ve never really been here before. Maybe it’s better on late March days like these when the wind is soft, and the light is soft, and the sunset is heading to the top of William Bay hills and rocks to the west—it glows the clouds a silver, then gold, then orange and red and pink. The waves keep crashing ashore in the bays below—the granite withstands most of their force.
Tall Trees on Bibbulmun Country
I’m further south, on the Bibbulmun Track, in Bibbulmun country, within the larger Bibbulmun country, and the trees are large. This is a bend in the Frankland River, populated by massive white-barked karris; as well as the large, red, knotted thickness and branching of tingle trees; plus some thick, straight-barked jarrah. There are large corky casuarinas, some balgas, zamias, marris and more. This part of the bend faces north. The trees are enormous, but the whole place feels soft, quiet, like the cold water river by the hut, flowing slowly through the sunshine and granite.
Paperbark Season
Can’t remember if I was told this or put two and something else together, but come March the paperbark are flowering, with a similar or same name as a fish running in nearby ocean—place even named similarly—ready to be caught and cooked wrapped in the papery bark. Anyway, they’re flowering again, big and light-yellowy bold, almost white, like big Christmas trees with countless lights—whether on nearby streets or at the lake—the lake where there’s also one or two with red flowers, deeper and darker, almost like a bottlebrush, throwing the whole thing into sudden contrast. It seems sudden because I’ve been away for a week. And I know by the time I am back from another few days away they will again be past their peak. All decorations eventually need to be taken down.
Jumping Fish Like a Silver Wave
This morning beach walk: white bait and then larger surface fish jumping. Then, in the afternoon above the sandbar on the river, another group of fish jumping clear of the water while seagulls, a pelican and diving terns strike by the river’s bend. The jumping fish lift up and fall back down again, only to be replaced by others, like a shining, cresting, silvery wave.
Galinyala Kangaroo
In Galinyala Port Lincoln proper, walking the Barngalla / Parnkalla trail not far from Shell Beach, looking at the limestone, gneiss and dolerite by the water’s edge, with shrubby low-down plants here, rising gradually higher to mallees behind, going up the hill, eventually to even higher eucalypts as the land rises. And here I’m struck not by an image of a human being with head at the water and limbs rising up the hill, but rather a kangaroo with body and limbs higher up, bending down with chest nearby, all the way down to the water’s edge, where it stoops its head and snout, and eventually drinks.
Gailnyala Barngalla Country
Nearby Galinyala Port Lincoln in Barngalla Country, I take a walk along the edge of the water by the start of the national park. The ground is all firm limestone, the highest trees mallees and the lower level maleleucas. Every now and then I get a view of the water of Proper Bay to my left, all calm out of the south easterly wind. An emu has left cakes of droppings along the path, with the odd kangaroo ones too. There are butterflies, honeyeaters, currawongs, a white faced heron by the water, many ants in nests along the trail, campsites by the water’s edge, cockies tongues and, I think, dodder laurel vines. I follow the trail up a rise, down a small slope—alto stratus above—pass by a well likely where an old tree had been, limestone grown around it, dry. Eventually I find the spot I’m looking for, paperbarks beside it. I climb down the limestone layers of shells and crusts and take off my shoes, wade into the shallow cold water, and sing a little…in this watery, earthy place.
Galinyala Port Lincoln Birds
Taking a walk this morning along the Parnkalla/Barngala trail named after the people of this country in Galinyala Port Lincoln, I eventually get to a tide-out spot where there are some white silver gulls, some brown grey teals, and a couple of lapwing plovers all yellow faced and noisy. The plovers fly on leaving the gulls and teals to the little rock pools in the shallows. And where the teals go in, all beak first and spearing, for whatever might lie in the wet mud and water, the seagulls wade over and stand above the puddles and begin splashing their feet like children do in boots just after rain. The gulls do it one foot and then the other with quite some coordination, and the noise of it is all sploshy plopping, rhythmic and somewhat loud. Every now and then they reach down with their beaks and pick up whatever their splashing releases from the puddly depths beneath their feet. At one point something comes out from under a splashing gull and must head in the direction of a nearby teal. Both gull and teal reach with their beaks for the fleeing breakfast but, alas for the teal, the gull seems to have won this one.
Different Chases
A strangely unsettled morning of bird chasings in which I see, in different places, jakalak the butcher bird chasing koolbardie the magpie, then later koolbardie the magpie chasing manatj the corella, then a big bunch of—murderous you might say—wardong crows go chasing one another.
John Stubley 