After the first rains came some birds, perhaps we could say ‘the usual suspects’. Now after more rain we again go to the lake and find water filling, growing wider (or else the water table rising), and for the first time since it reached its serious dryness, yet—the Pacific black ducks—are back; there are about half a dozen, some of them even look as if they’re swimming, or at least floating. White ibis again, straw necked ibis—rain-time opportunists. The two shelducks are back again, coming and going as they have been these last few weeks and months, often doing their best spoonbill impersonations in the shoreline shallows. Wayan the whitefaced heron is here, so often as he is, in the backdrop. More janjarak black winged stilts—maybe half a dozen. Dotterels still, maybe a couple of new arrivals. And of all things we see a swan—sitting on the water at one point; two days later he’ll again be gone, as will the Pacific black ducks. But more janjarak will come. Wayan will stay, as will the dotterels and shelducks. And, eventually, the other ducks too will return, and all the others. Yet another breathing in and out in the bigger breathing of the seasons and the year, both for water and for all its attendants/attendance.
Category Archives: Shoreline Poetics
Full Moon Humidity
How often do we see the full moon bring moisture, clouds, rain, humidity? This Friday night between the seasons of Djeran and Makuru, late June—no clouds, still and clear above, with the first stars shining through. We go up to the river, walk along it and, even though I knew it was there, I was struck by the actual sight of the top two-thirds of the big yellow moon sliding behind and up through the south-eastern horizon, a couple of spreading eucalypts in front of it, silhouetted. We were standing on a limestone hill looking over—the whole scene somehow so old and bony: moon, eucalypt, limestone cliffs layered up and crumbling away, the reflection on the water’s surface—a staircase, so they say, moving as we move; while all around us, nothing but warmth and moisture—drops already settling on cars and bricks—the air thick with it, in a way it not so often is here, without clouds…as if the equator continues its march, pushing south, pushing down.
Water Levels, Ground Levels
A couple of months ago someone at the lake said to me, “My wife and I have decided that the water isn’t going down any further because it’s reached the water table.” Something in the way he said it made me sceptical. And, anyway, I try not for explanations but for portraying. And so, in the meantime, though I have gone away and come back again, the lake, it must be said, has not dried out completely, though hot dry weather has persisted. And when it has rained new puddles have formed, but they too have not dried out during further hot dry weather that followed. So, without reaching for an explanation (perhaps failing), but reaching through portrayal, which my shoreline colleagues have somehow added to, we might well be forced to say that we are not looking so much at the drying water of the lake sucking itself away; but rather the breathing of the water level of the whole area—the so-called water table. If so, it is less a case of something drying from the outside in (or topside down), but rather something rising and falling from the inside out (or underside up).
Swamphen Bathroom
At the lake again today I see Kwirlam the purple swamphen in a little puddle of water by the edge of the reeds he likes to inhabit this time of year. This bath sits under a little dead-log overhang, and seems now just deep enough for him to sit in and make a few red-beak head-dives under the water and then spill this over his back and wings, wetting his feathers. He does this rapidly—over and over again—diving down head first, while crouching, with the water falling over his back. After a dozen or so of these, he steps out and shakes himself a little in the sunshine.
Just Manatj-ing
At the lake today I see three manatj corellas head south over the pools of water. There have been many on the streets of Cottesloe closer to the ocean pecking at the cones of Norfolk pines and, maybe, other roots and seeds. But I realise it’s been a while since I’ve seen many here—these three seem to look down at the water, but decide to keep on flying. I lose them after a while, or look away, only to find a short time later koolbardie the magpie chasing three more manatj—or maybe the same—out over the lake, away from the golfcourse and trees.
Djeran, adulthood season; first rains, without the rain.
The Season of Fertility
We are deep into the season of adulthood, butting up against the season of fertility. And still the water hasn’t come. Kwirlam the swamp hen has been running around the lake today, chasing one another, and there is plenty of room to run. There’s mud and grass, but not much water, and only a few other birds in the morning sun: a couple of shelducks, three black winged stilts and a handful of little noodilyarong black fronted dotterels. Other than that, it’s a wide open field to chase and hunt and flap and fly and run. And they do, one on one, past each other, their red beaks low low to the ground, their black bodies moving on their whirling legs, their purple chests bent down. Sometimes they move so fast they might as well spread their wings a little and fly for a time, their feet protruding behind—until they come to land again—then letting them down early, reaching for the ground.
Seasons have their laws to follow, even if the rains don’t come.
Goomal Morning
I arrive at the lake this morning and there seems to be one helluva racket amongst the birds by the big trees to the east. Not only are the lorikeets all screeching, wardong is crowing up a storm, and jakalak the red wattlebird is giving away his true name loudly, incessantly. And even old dili-brit the magpie lark is there singing out his high-pitched protest. I see koolbardie the magpie on a branch or two, though he doesn’t seem to say much—one of the few. And I wonder if there might be a raptor circling higher, or even perched among the trees, for they don’t seem to be chasing much, or evading either. It’s just an all-round protesting cacophony. I walk the path and approach the lakeside edge, and there spot a few people looking up at a forking ledge amongst the gums. And there in one little hollow sits a still and furry morning goomal, the possum, awake in the day, kept awake no doubt by all this bothering. Some town official has been keeping the birds at bay, or at least that’s what I gather from what I overhear the nearby people say. I walk a little south, and look up at him, all pink-nosed and big, black eyed. I go and watch the lake for a while, and wait for the whole thing to pass over, the whole thing to subside. Eventually people seem to move on and even the birds do too. I walk back a little and look up at the little fella in the tree. There is no more screeching. Jakalak remains though, looking on inquisitively, jumping from branch to branch. The official is doing a lap to catch lead-less dogs, while someone keeps on filming and taking photos, wanting me to know everything she’s just learned: “The ranger threw sticks at the birds; not usually out in the day apparently; probably traumatised, the little thing.” Someone on a bike stops to ask me if it’s a koala; their accent is South African. They then immediately suggest “or a possum” before I can reply. I can see his little limbs are shaking. He’s licking some of them. I walk around the other side of the tree—he doesn’t seem bloody or pecked at, like one I saw here a year or two ago, in nearby tree, who had a run-in with the crows. I consider calling the same person I did back then, and waiting for him and wildlife officers and more town employees to come. But goomal looks like he’s stopped shaking, I can’t see any blood, and the birds seem to have moved on for the most part. Last year the possum eventually moved to another tree. And I wonder what more could be done for this one now. So I get on, no birds left screaming, no people left to bother him, for now.
(Post script: I come again the next day and, from that spot at least, he is gone.)
Ngalkaning and Jerenkar
Ngalkaning (or nankeen if you can’t manage that) night heron all rufous and still in the evening by the river, perched above a pylon at the end of the water-police jetty. And slightly above him, on a bigger pylon, two janjarak silver gulls squawking and screaming at him to leave. They don’t fly or dive bomb, but merely screech down at him from a feet or two away, all flustered and inflamed. At one point the heron seems to point his beak a little more their way and then open it up, but his movements are so subtle it’s hard to really see, and maybe it was imagined. The gulls squawk and protest even louder, and the heron seems to return to his earlier position—one eye on the gulls, the other looking occasionally sideways at the river beneath. In any case, he seems poised—looking at his assailants, but also somewhere between them and whatever might be swimming below. One or two other herons glide by, letting out a throaty bark from time to time. It’s quite the raucous scene, and I consider going. But I watch a little longer—long enough to hear the gulls eventually lessen their accusations, and ultimately cease altogether. Then the silence (and the river passing). Then I go.
The Dying of the Trees
For the last few weeks I’ve been watching and hearing about the dying of the trees. Today I really noticed it most obviously after a few days being inside with illness. The dry time has continued into this season of first rains. And some trees haven’t made it. I hear of others, further from the city, but even here I’ve seen many peppermints—wanil—dry and baked and dead; many tuarts by the lake, other eucalypts. There are smaller shrubs by the river, acacias maybe (or were they cockie’s tongues?) that also haven’t made it, in addition to the dead casuarina’s poisoned for million dollar views.
And then at the lake today I thought, and surely it couldn’t be for the first time, of the dead tree stumps in the middle of the lake, dry and grey. They have been there as long as I’ve been visiting—a seemingly permanent fixture in the up-and-down movements of the water and birds from year to year. But for such trees to have once been here—eucalypts I guess, maleleucas maybe—this place would have once been much drier, for it’s in the centre of the lake that their skeletons rest. And they rest next to the straight edge of a fence line, protruding from the bed not quite as high. In the northern part of the lake the dead remains stand even higher, serving most recently as perch for the black shouldered kite. The northern ground is higher, dries out first, is covered in greener grass earlier, so it makes sense the trees were higher there—but even at the southern end they must not have been tiny; the ground must have been much drier, for no tree or bush grows there now, between the deepest centre, and the highest water periphery; only the back-and-forward movement of grasses breathing in the seasons, the rushes and reeds at the edges, then ground cover, going out to some shrubs and sedges and, on dryer land, eventually trees.
Three Kings
For two evenings in a row I have stood under three noolyarak white-tailed black cockatoos as they flew from the western side of the curving river, across cliffs, to the eastern edge—two nights in a row, their long slow flap of wings, like a sculpting of air, the occasional screech let free. And then again this morning, while driving, further up the coast, three more coming into land in some backyard tree carefully chosen, though unseen by me on the road. Three noolyarak like three kings going.
John Stubley 