South Beach Miami, amongst the long sandy island now built-up, with art deco hotels and other layers. We’re sitting on a rooftop amongst the humidity and cooling wind, amongst the cumulus clouds and passing rain, amongst the sunset flaming golden over the city to the east. And even here, amongst these differences and similarities to all things West Australia, there are the parakeets shooting past, sunset screeching.

Reminded now of granite ocean rocks near Denmark—the way the incoming tide washes in, rushes around one puddled area, then flows on to another level—the whole thing like a series of pools formed by the water’s moving, like a kind of natural watery sculpture—flowing form.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.