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.
Category Archives: Shoreline Poetics
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.
River Fish
Down by the Derbarl Yerrigan yet again—afternoon walking—and there in the river water, by the end of the Harvest Street jetty, are a few whitebait sitting stationary in the water, their noses pointed upstream on the outgoing tide, mouths open to any bits of food and detritus that might pass by. At one point a jellyfish small and brown passes a little deeper down, with a group of trumpeter fish, I believe, feeding off its tentacles and the inside of its jelly dome. I walk on to the jetties closer to the apartments downriver, and walk out on one, looking down among the muscled brown pylons, and see there a couple of slow moving fish that look as if the pylon colours and rough edges have up and taken the form of a sea creature—some kind of browny, knobbly reef-type fish perfectly camouflaged in the jetty and boat-pen barnacles beneath…unless they leave them for a moment, however brief.
As I Was Saying
Just when I was saying to my friend that there are really no birds left at the dry lake except the swamphen, the heron, a sandpiper, some dotterels, rails, and a few black winged stilts, in fly a couple of raptors. “Raptors?” he asks. “Birds of prey.” In addition to all these walkers on wet and dry mud, we still have a couple of birds looking over; a couple of birds flying: the first a medium sized, compact, orange one, maybe a kestrel, maybe a juvenile hobby. “I’m not so good with my raptors,” I say. And then, a moment later into full view: a black-shouldered kite. “As I was saying, not much here, except…”
Wayan and Kwirlam
The only birds I can immediately see at the lake today are wayan the white faced heron, grey and thinly gentleman-like in his stick-like wanderings; and kwirlam the purple swamphen all dark and round, ball-like, close to the ground. Kwirlam is one of the few, if not the only bird, who’ll stay within the lake’s area when it dries completely. Not quite there yet, wayan stays around the lake, walking the drier and sometimes wetter areas; this day he’s half-way between both, quietly sizing up the insects in front of him. And from the south comes one kwirlm, hoofing along at a trot, surely not going to run right into wayan. But yes, we (me and wayan) both seem to see this at the last minute. I expect wayan to back away, this not being fully his place, but he raises up his wings, extends his neck and uncoils as if to throw his beak at kwirlam, spear like, and adding to this a kind of high-guttural cry. Kwirlam is taken aback, pauses, retreats a step, and then walks around wayan. Was I the only one who noticed this epic standoff between the nervous, head-like heron, and the round, digestive hen?
The Wall is Breached!
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.
Water Stops Itself
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.
Birin Birin Again
After not having seen birin birin the rainbow bee eater for my first forty-four years, I’ve suddenly seen them in three places in the space of three weeks. But isn’t that the way with things? First we might hear a story, and in so doing develop some kind of organ for potentially seeing, then one day we see something, and our rudimentary organ must then fit and adapt to what is being seen—we now have a more developed birin-birin sense organ—somethign to see the orange head and green chest and other rainbow colours of balanced triangular wings and longer beak ready to catch bees and other insects, forming themselves into somewhat swarming groups, not unlike the bees they seek, making a stange kind of cricket or cicada-type chirp. First at Kartagarrup Kings Park, then at a pool on Bilya Madjit the Murray River near Dwellingup, and then again today near Perry Lakes—all of it Bunaru second summer before, I’m told, they’ll head north once more. Birin birin organs forming. And one cannot help but wonder what other unformed organs lie in waiting—what other things are we not seeing, humanity?
There is Cooli!
In the last couple of weeks it’s been the same band of usual suspects as the lake inhales its last dirty puddles. Kwirlam the swamphen, the resident lake shoreline bird, here even when the lake is all but cracked earth and grass. Nolyang the dusky moorhen, smaller than kwirlam, still patrolling some of the shallow pools. The black-winged stilt in twos or fours, still stretching their pencil legs within the water. Wayan the whitefaced heron, larger, patrolling, lurking the expanding plains of the dryer mud between drying pool and encroaching grass. And old sharp-tail aka woody the sandpiper walking small around the edges or the centre here and there, his tail bobbing as he goes, like a little tuft of mud up and given form. But today, an old familiar friend re-appeared—one I’d wondered at whether or not he’d left when the lake began to dry; a smaller type of hen, really, larger than a crake (who I also haven’t seen for days, weeks)—cooli, the buff-banded rail; orange headed and chested with stripy lines to boot, a kind of turtle-shell-coloured brown on his back, slinking through the grasses by the winter lake’s edge, now dry. Cooli who I’d missed. Cooli who’s stayed. (Almost three years since the lake has fully dried.)
John Stubley 