Category Archives: Lakes

Kooli and Quenda

I watch quenda the southern brown bandicoot work his way through the sword sedges, and down onto the lush green ground cover covered with small blue flowers and the low-down working of bees. He moves along, burying his long-thin snouty nose and front feet in one spot after another, little ears listening, going down for the good dirt, digging. His fur is all brown and hair, smooth though made up of hundreds of finer points. He hops along like a little kangaroo, though more bent to the ground, stretched out along it, cultivating.

And from the edges of my observing I see kooli the buff banded rail emerge from where he so often figures from. His back all turtle patterned and brown, his underside a kind of zebra patterning, his chest and eye a sort of rusted orangey-brown, what the birders call ‘buff’. He moves along, occasionally flicking his tail as he pushes his beak into place after place along the soil of the dryer bank by the rushes. His feathers are all neatly folded over one another, giving him the patterning and colours, feather-ends all rounded and fine, each tip planted within his skin. 

And I watch him, kooli, and quenda the bandicoot get slowly closer in their foraging, until they are about to cross directions, about 30 centimetres apart. And I wonder who will make way for who. And then, at the same moment, they both hop a little past each other and away, keeping their distance, neither advancing towards the other, a kind of mirroring of one another’s movements. 

And I can’t help wondering about the forming of each on this the edge of the lake, here at the edge of the world. The dry lake shoreline of birak summertime has fashioned from out of its edges these two creatures, one a bird, one a mammal, though so similar in their workings, in their doings—as if there hovered above each a kind of bright shadow, out of which one day one was fashioned, out of which the next day the other. A kind of lake shoreline cultivation shadow, condensing into quenda, condensing into kooli, the way ice condenses from water into different forms; same water; each coming from the same spring; a common languaging before it fell into these here terms. Quenda the southern bandicoot. Kooli the buff banded rail.

Archetypal Swamp Hen

I watch as the swamphen walks his recently dried-out lake shoreline border. He is the most obvious bird that’s left. A black-blue purple, with red beak, hen sized, singing up the will-filled depths, tail flicking as he walks the shoreline with large splayed-toed unwebbed feet, the now-cracked bed littered with its prints. I watch him at the borders of the grass and faintest high-water line, still wet, most recent; the whole thing shrinking. It looks like his domain. A guardian of a kind of threshold. One of the few, maybe the only watery bird, who stays. 

But then in the clump of maleleucas, on which used to be a kind of island, I see a small flitting and a rushing, as one bird chases another, just a couple of shadows, then disappearing behind another clump. Then out they shoot again, and I see they’re crakes, probably spotted, but they’re so far away. Like a smaller version of the swaphen—a smaller version in and out of branches and shrubby trees. A smaller version of the bird who stays. And I’m reminded too of the buff-banded rail. All belly striped and buff/orange colourings, slightly bigger than the crake, but stopping short of the swaphen. Another shoreline bird who stays, but masked and masking within the reeds and rushes and the shade. The rail another kind of version of this archetypal shoreline birding. The moorhens and the coots step into the water more often than not, swimming; and leave with the water. Not the swamphen, and now I’m wondering maybe too the crake and rail. But what they each seem to announce is an archetypal shoreline lakeside bird. A bird that gives these three forms for this place, but given different places, different plants and lakes and waters, generally a different context, would produce different birds. Like the native black tailed hen. Like a million other other-place variations. 

Like Goethe’s archetypal plant with an infinite amount of potential manifestations, so too the lakeside threshold bird. The lakeside threshold hen.

The Drying of the Lake

I’ve been spending some time at the lake these last days and weeks, feeling like a kind of (death) doula as it dries out. This is the first time it’s dried in three years, after a couple of wet winters. The water recedes, the soft mud dries under the sun and then begins to crack. Footprints left by swamp hens, turtles, foxes, humans go from soft to baked in as they shift from wetter spots to more dry, disappearing as they walk to ground that’s higher/dryer. Most of the stalks retreat to deeper waters, the dotterels and sandpipers move on. Until almost all the birds are left in the final southern-ended deeper-water pond. A handful of swans, some pacific black ducks, stilts, dotterels, coots and moorhens, one spoonbill, a couple of wood-ducks and pink ears, a buff-banded rail or two, a few spotted crakes and some warblers in the reeds. But this is a low they haven’t seen in years. Each day it shrinks a little further, higher land exposed, the water creeping in from the edges, tracks left underneath and then in its wake. Ducks stick to the morning shade when available, the crows or wagtails descend down to the edges, the corellas land on logs amongst ducks for drinks. A sudden shower might boost the coffers for some days, a week maybe, but the overall trend leads towards drying out, leads inevitably towards death—when I know it’ll mostly only be the swamp hens that are left. 

I’ve seen it dry, I’ve seen it fill. I’ve seen it hover in between. But this day it makes me reflect on larger drying outs, larger shutting downs, larger deaths. Makes me think of things past middle age. Makes me think of plants that whither, and end-of-day sunsets. Makes me think of our world today, knowing that we may get a chance showering of rain, or see things more life-filled and younger for a day. But that the overall trend now is one just past middle age, tending as it must towards death. Which is not to say that things are too late, or that things must be given up. Any more than it is correct to lament the setting of the sun, the shift into older age, the drying of the lake. All things come with time, and bring their next-step gifts. The seasons come and go, and we find ourselves within them. So yes, there are cycles, but there is direction too. The seasons are but part of the larger seasons of the earth. Of the earth, of sun and stars and moon. There are rhythms and patterns, things follow a breathing, but a forward momentum too. The rain will return to this lake, the sun will rise again tomorrow, the plant will die and new seeds will grow anew. But it is not some endlessly recurring loop. Something larger is at play. Something longer at work. The overall trend of the earth is one, we must say, that has shifted past its middle age. 

And so we must ask ourselves what we find in the closing of the day, in the withering of the plant, in the older years of age; in the rising of the moon, in the waters that recede and mud that cracks. We find nothing but a receding of the physical life, but also a kind of liberation. As the forces of life wane, so the death forces are released. Liberated. Not in a destructive way, but in a potentially fruitful way. The night is liberated. Given freedom. Given free reign. What do we find in darkness? What do we find in death? We find somethign that lives on, immaterial, unphsyical though it may be. Consciousness. Who we are continues between falling asleep and waking up from rest. Otherwise we wouldn’t know who or where we were each and every morning. Something of us continues, even, beyond the reach of the moment of death. 

And so the lake continues. And so the day continues. And so the plant continues. And so our sleeping and dying selves continue. Not to the same beginnings, but to the next step on our evolving paths. So the earth continues. So society continues. To its next beginnings. To its next stepping offs. 

How to work, though, with that which stretches across? That which works and weaves throughout the night. That which works and weaves beyond death, beyond Thomas’ “dying of the light.” I dare not rage against, but find the new light within the darkness, an inverted inner light, and build with that the next steps. Lakes. Plants. Days. Lives. Societies. Planets. 

And so it is a choice we face. Going down with the dying day and plant and life. Or going with this, going through, through and with the night, through and with the death. Finding somethign there to build up with; to consciously build the next.