Walking into the ocean
step after step
on the sand.
Right about the spot
where the small waves break
there’s backwash
colliding.
Water on water.
The top of the little wave
cresting suddenly
as the backwash hits.
Below,
on the sand,
clumps of limestone
have gathered.
Category Archives: Oceans
The Animals Approach
Wardandi country with nephew Fin and a similar thing is happening to around this time last year. When he first arrived in Australia and we went to Dwellingup, he would say things like, ”Have you ever seen a goanna?” and there would be one. “What about an emu?” and soon after one would appear. Then we went to Dunsborough. “Snakes?” and then we’d see one. “You’d better be careful what you ask next,” I said. The following day, while walking next to the shallows of Geographe Bay, he asked if I’d ever seen a shark up close. We then saw a shovelnose where I’d never seen one before; it was headed one way, so we doubled back and decided to have a quick swim. Fin decided to go further out. He’s adamant the shark brushed his leg.
That was all last year. This time when we go to Wardandi Country he doesn’t say anything. But when we sit and have lunch at Yallingup, a yoornt bobtail/blutongue lizard emerges from out the bushes, across a long stretch of grass and comes right to our feet; I have to erect a kind of wall of thongs and towel to keep him at bay. The seagulls were a little bit more predictable. That evening at Castle Rock carpark quenda the bandicoot appears from near the barbecues and comes within a couple of arm lengths. Shortly after, karda the goanna lazily turns around by the edge of the Meelup trail to look at us, but doesn’t bother to move as we go by. When we put our rafts in the water we see a large baamba stingray moving in the shallows. We ride the wind all the way towards Meelup Beach, pausing at times along the way to lie back and look out north across all the water of the bay. Coming into Meelup we pass through a couple of large white rocks of roosting cormorants—appearing like a kind of gauntlet—with only one or two birds on nearby smaller rocks flying away as we pass. The next day, walking along the same trail, a young yonga kangaroo lifts its head and observes us no more than four metres away. We pause and wait for it to hop off, but he stays put, only moving his ears slightly. And, finally, that evening, goomal the possum arrives on the verandah. We open the door to observe him, and he begins to approach, pink nose in the air.
Wind
A wind has sprung up overnight and blows strong, fast and slightly cold throughout the whole day. We take a walk along the beach into it—sand flies everywhere. No sandflies. It is one of the strongest winds I can remember, especially for this time of year. The following day I look at the weather maps. I see that a tropical low/monsoon trough coming down from the equator joined with a cold-front low blowing up from the southern ocean (followed by a high pressure system). This would have created the conditions necessary for extra wind to blow up from the south, and that’s exactly what happened. Nephew points out that it’s interesting this wind happened at the same time as storms in the UK, and wonders if they are connected. But my reference maps don’t stretch that far.
Central Bay Cliffs
Down on the beach for two days in a row: a lower line of small bay ridges forming smaller bays within the larger bay of Leighton Beach to Cables Station. The tide is morning low, with little variation with the mid-sky moon. The angle of the slope from flat sand down to the water is pretty gradual, 30 degrees or less, and there is a hint of bay-ridge remnants from a formerly higher tide further up the slope. Around mid bay, between the lower ridges, I notice a couple of cliff faces forming—places where the long, slow, back-and-forth of gradual tide—stormless, swell-less—leans into a kind of cliff-barrier where the water, due to what it has created in the sand, is unable to rise any higher; a cliff place where water starts to cut horizontally into the sand, rather than wash over and flatten it out, as it does further north.
Sting Ray
Walking along the ocean shoreline Sunday morning. And between the handful of scattered swimmers spread out between Leighton Beach and Cables Station I see, moving south to north, a small dark cloud. The thought ‘sting ray’ immediately comes to mind. The black cloud continues moving along the base of the light blue water, about ten metres out. It does not surface for air. Baamba sting ray it must be. Not the small ones I see often down in Geograph Bay, nor the massive ones down in Hamelin Bay, but the ones about the same size I used to see swimming the reefs between Cottesloe and North Cottesloe about twenty years ago.
Flying Kite
Sunday evening, with a wind that has been offshore all day, Katie and I walk over to the pedestrian bridge above the trainline and watch the sunset. Also there, though not watching the sunset but the ground below us, is a black shouldered kite. He flies past us, hovers, head to the wind, looking straight down, flapping though otherwise perfectly still; then dropping hovering, flapping, dropping. His wings are white against the setting sun, but for his shoulders clearly dark.
He drops to the earth as the sun does, and as we turn for indoors.
Still Shoreline
SE morning wind becoming SW during the day. Blue sky, alto to the north. The beach with a gradual sand decline to the water—very slight lines of bay ridges, both near the water and up higher. It’s low ride, with the moon moving from peak south gradually to mid sky. There’s little to no seaweed left—all mostly covered. The whole scene speaks, still, of a recent calm beach shoreline history.
Mid-Sky Moon
The moon is about mid sky again (between the month’s peak north and peak south), and I’m down at the beach. The shoreline is at around 30 degrees with duel ridge mounds—one line near the top of the incline, the other nearer the water. There has not been too much of a change between high and low tides. And the weather has been pretty normal for this time of year. The mid-sky moon—of neither higher high tides, nor lower low tides, but bunched up smaller variations with more than one high or low in a day—clearly written on the shoreline.
Ideas of Landscape
The landscape is an ‘organism’ with different ‘organs’ (somewhat like a healthy compost).
If a counterpicture is needed for extractive mining and agriculture, maybe we could be ‘putting something back in the ground’.
The human being is in the landscape in many ways, including a metabolic system underground, head above ground, and rhythmic system in the soil between.
There are rivers between WA and India severed by the splitting up of Gondwana.
Some shorelines of Whadjuk Country on the Swan Coastal Plain: the Yilgarn Craton to the east (water from runoff), ocean to the west (water from sea), plus water underground.
Of the City Sky
On the old traffic bridge stretching across the river from North Fremantle—where even now they build a new bridge next door—above a lightpost on the upriver side, just as the road starts to hang out over the water—in that upper world, looking down on it all, including the river, sits, as so often he does, dorn dorn the osprey. The next day I’m walking across the high trainline pedestrian bridge towards the ocean, and on the westernmost lightpost, high above coastal dunes and plants and road, sits a small raptor of some kind—I’m guessing a kestrel, the sun heading towards setting beyond. And on the way home, on a power line the other side of the highway, sits wardo wardong the grey butcherbird, all black and white and high, singing as if from the periphery of life.
John Stubley 