There’s a turning inside out that can happen when you look upon a landscape, be it lake or river or land or sea or anything really. Suddenly each part is not separate from the rest, but somehow speaks of the whole of the landscape. The whole lake (or much larger place) in the plant, the tree, the earth, the bird, the flower, the bee. The whole landscape in me. And so in a way it looks back upon itself when I see, when it sees itself reflected in its parts. The parts recognising itself, recognising me.
Category Archives: Shoreline Poetics
Fisherboy
I go and meet a couple of friends by the river—one a boy of eight or nine; the other night he was interested in spotting birds and fish and crabs and rabbits nearby. Tonight, just as excited to see me, but in between he’d also met a boy of fourteen with rod and reel and lure and crabbing net. The fourteen-year old looked down into the depths and saw more than I did—saw blue mana crabs, saw mullet, was particularly tuned to flathead. When I couldn’t focus any longer, I sometimes called out a dolphin from time to time, the jumping of some whitebait—things that left the water and rose above the surface line—but the teenager saw all below this, his neck permanently bent. Where I saw heron, he saw blowfish, the flashing blue manna, the shooting tail of the flattest head. Where I lived above the surface, he lived below the waterline. This fisher boy lived in it—lived under the surface—and didn’t need to try…where others did.
The Shoreline of Death
Last night after another 40-something day I went down to the beach. And after swimming spotted something moving in the shadows on the sand not far from a couple of people nearby. It took a while to register its form and movements as it appeared near the waterline and moved back towards the dunes. It glided easily on all fours, silently, looking around, smelling the ground, untroubled, unbothered by humans. A fox. It trotted along the sand in the hot night, going almost as far as the dunes before stopping, and slowly slinking in the direction of another person, on their phone, not noticing. Then it stopped, lay down. The person picked up their stuff and moved off. I walked back towards the car parks. I caught up with the person and asked if he’d seen the fox. He looked back as it picked itself up from the shadows and bounced across in the direction in which he’d been sitting. “No,” he said, sounding suprised. “Never seen one here. Are they dangerous?”
This morning I was driving home, further along the coast, next to a break they call isolaters, and noticed a raptor hovering above the dunes. It was all white except the black undersitde of its wingtips, it’s beak and eye, and, when it dived a little or hovered higher, a black patch also on its shoulders. And so we name things—a black shouldered kite. It hovered effortlessly as the wind rolled round its wings, looking from time to time straight, then right, its head pointed into the southwesterly, the whole city cooling a little. It rose again, adjusted, went a little to the side, then dropped slowly, its talons extended, before pausing, rising again, then turning left, flying over where I was parked.
This shoreline, this salty shoreline, is one of the cunning, and of the head, be it canine or bird or a hundred other things. This shoreline, this heady salty shoreline is a shoreline of death.
The Day the Ducks Left
After two 45-degree days, early bunuru / second summer, waning gibbous moon in the morning western sky, water to a level making it difficult to swim, I notice there are but two ducks left. The blue and musk left when diving was no longer an option, the shelducks went with them, the pink ears flew a few days ago, and yesterday the teals and most of the Pacific black ducks left. Only two Pacific blacks remain, one in the eucalyptus shade on the eastern edge, one under the Moreton bay figs on the southern end.
With the others went most of the swans, bar two of this season’t cygnets—one in the centre, black-grey feathers in the morning sun, his fearless sibling eating figs, then returning across the water. Otherwise it’s black winged stilts, a white faced heron in the centre, moorhens in the mud, swamphens on the grass, crakes on the drier ground, with a few dotterels and a sandpiper further south, maybe a small raptor, rails in the rushes, and so on. But, mostly, today, the wetter of the water birds have moved on.
Water and Fire
I walk the parkland between the tuarts by western Perry Lake and note the brown stains on the often bark-less trees. They’re scarred not by markings but by bore water waterings—the grass between them green. I look around the lake and note the reveg plantings, but with weeds on the shoreline between larger trees—a weeping willow even. More water here now that water from a nearby lake has been diverted, no longer heading out to sea.
I look across the scene of brown barked trees and the green of grass between, created walking space with overhead canopy, thinking of movement as well as camping, noting a statue marking a large global scout gathering here, noting other unmarked gatherings in soil beneath.
And I realise, where Europeans use water, Aboriginal people use fire—not with fear, but sustainably, creatively.
Lakes
Some places tell you what they need. Some places tell you what they are. One lake nearby is a place of initiation. Another a place of gathering and camping. One a place of birthing.
So they say.
Mystery Bird
I am glad that there still exists unknown things—that there are still mysteries yet to know. Though not so that we should give in and let them be, but continue to strive for what they wish to teach. One came and landed at the lake today. A little white cloud, with a kind of black splotch somewhere—it was pretty far off on the other side. Smaller than a corella, roughly the same as a seagull, but with strangely longer wings when it landed and then took off from its spot on the dry land by the water, before flying even further up the lake. Any other day I might have walked around and tried to follow it, but today was 34 degrees by 8:30, and I was sticking to the shade. Safe in not knowing maybe.
Though I wonder still what it could have been. At first I thought an albino pidgeon or dove maybe. But its wings seemed too long. Beyond that I would really just be guessing. A ground-landing bird by the lake’s edge, white with black splotch somewhere, solitary, heading north maybe, not scattering any other birds. This is all I know.
It was a bird that I have seen, but I could only be slightly more specific than that. A mystery in the landscape of the lake. I have seen what I have seen, but maybe also I’ve seen the limits to my concepts. The shoreline of ideas. I’ve seen the thing in front of me, but can’t see the concept or idea of it, or link them in my thinking. Or at least not yet.
What the Lake Had to Say
I was a bit out of sorts at the lake today. Might also have something to do with two forty-plus degree days. I was finding it hard to really see it. Feel it. Hear it. My head was awake, maybe too awake, all nerves firing. The heat was almost stifling. 34 degrees, 8:30am in the shade. I drank a juice and the usual chai. Pacific black ducks sat motionless in the eucalyptus shade. I did the same and tried to dodge any rays that shot through. Quenda was there, a few of them, that old southern brown bandicoot. Cooli the buff banded rail. Quite a few little dotterels combed the dryer shoreline on the sun-filled eastern side not too far from what was left of the water. Seven swans in the centre. A handful of crakes on the other side of the reeds, still on dryer land. Nolyang the moorhen almost getting stuck in the wetter waterline mud. The Eurasian coot sometimes with him. No more yadjingoorong the red necked avocet. Black winged stilts remained though, letting out the odd little high pitched bark. Some teals amongst the Pacific black ducks further out maybe. Correllas in a slow moving, slightly less raucous cloud to the south—one even tried to come in and land on a stilt, before the stilt moved and the corella flopped down on the water, the first time I’d seen that. Wagtails and wattlebirds flapped around me. Wardong the crow played with something in the green groundcover below. No reed warblers seen today. No more Western spoonbill wading. Further down, a single sharp-tailed sandpiper with back feathers twitching, playing. Even a mystery white-feathered long-winged bird with black splotch I at first thought was an albino pidgeon or dove, landing on and departing from the far-off other side. In short, a slow-moving hot morning with not too many changes to the last few days.
But there’s always something changing. I tried to observe it all, even if it was hard to currently feel it, hot as it was, as detached and hovering as everything seemed to be—like the essence of the place floated just above everything I could see, the way Wadjemup Rottnest sometimes sits doubled up on itself on the Western shoreline edges. I found it hard to climb that far, or bring it back down. Maybe I was hovering up there with it.
In any case, I stayed, and even sat a little in the chair beneath the shade—something I so seldom do, harder as it is to get the better, longer, deeper shoreline view. But I did, and looked at what I could see, knowing that the rest was there too, including a couple of swaphens a little further to the right, partially in, partially out of viewing lines. And then I closed my eyes. And I heard the koolbardie magpie off behind me to the right, the squwaking of the corellas to the far left, a karak red-tailed black cockatoo somewhere to the east in their favourite trees currently out of sight. The more melodious of wagtail whistles, a slow wardong moan, the cluck of the crakes, the guttural crowl of kwirlam the swampy hen further to the right. I looked again, then closed my eyes some more. I heard a rustling by my side and saw a rail had come up the bank nearby. One or two people walked slowly past in the ever-growing light.
I let the sounds and images go. And made space for the lake as a whole. And slowly, gradually it came trickling in. The essence of the thing. That familar thing. Maybe made more obvious today by the distance which I had at first felt myself away. I had to really earn it today, work for it. It came in gently, but the force of it is always strong—filling not just open eyes, and open ears and hearts, but open hands too. My nerves had lined up with it, the feelings fell in step, and now the will put itself in service of it too. I always feel changed in such a moment, a slightly different human being. But I often wonder how such an experience changes that which is perceived. We go with things in such moments—nature and human beings. And I had the feeling that on the deepest level this is what caring means.
And then today I decided to go a little further, and asked if there was anything in particular that the lake itself might need. And this is what it said, though not in words, but still as a kind of speaking, in me: “The figs can go. Maybe a paperbark or two. The main thing is you, human beings. I need you to walk me, see me truly, sing me if you can. Do not completely fence me. I am not a zoo. Maybe a bit of burning round the edges. But again: The main thing is you. I am a place of transformation.”
Australia Day Shags
There is a tuart tree near the base of the limestone cliffs above the river in North Fremantle where all the cormorants sit—-a couple of trees. Beneath them, the rocks and other plants are white with their droppings. They roost in their tree, sometimes black and white, sometimes all black, sometimes small, sometimes large, a few moving away during the day or night maybe, but in the evening, when I usually see them, the tree is full. The cormorant tree. Shags as they are sometimes called. Phalacrocorax (mostly melaneleucos, perhaps the odd varius, orsulcirostris maybe). Kakak. Midi. Koordjikit. Their tree, partway down the cliff.
But not this last Australia Day, when around evening time we took a walk along the clifftop and saw the bend in the river full, the sandbar crowded…with boats. Boats and loud music and flags. A kind of celebratory cacophony. Australiana. We walked along, and I tried not to make any judgments, nor hold too many opinions, but just observe, which today meant also listening. And as we walked through this unusualness, or usualness brought to the surface, one thing did strike me as more unusual than the rest of the unusual-ness. And that was almost all the cormorants who usually sat in ther tree roosting, were this day in the air and circling. Not sitting in their tree, not flying to or away from it, but circling in the air around it. Not landing, but instead looking uncertain, the silence of their mostly silent perch now broken.
We walked on, and further along the path I saw two black swans who, usually on slightly busier weekends when a handful of boats are moored by the cliffs, swim from one boat to another and look for food. But this evening, even they stayed away.
We took a more inland track when we walked back, and later that night, amongst all the news items of the day—including a tree branch falling on some people in Kaarta Gar-up Kings Park (and with this I was reminded of an earlier year Australia Day plane crash into the river)—I saw footage of a brawl of younger men upon the sandbar; young men ankle deep and fighting. Testing something maybe. Testing themselves. Testing each other.
There was a story shared by an Aboringal friend about this place during a Perth Festival event some years ago. It featured young men and testing. Tunnels. Water. There was more.
But I can’t help thinking of those cormorants. And shadows. When something isn’t seen truly then all we have are shadows. Shadows of cormorants circling. Shadows on the sandbar, brawling. The water’s surface reflecting a higher light above.
Dolphins on the Sandbar
Arriving at the turning of this river this day, where the sandbar has been made with the flowing in and flowing out of tides, we find a splashing of water, a flying-hopping of pelicans, a movig dark cloud under the water where the white of the sandbar should be. And then we see the fins coming up through the water, many fins, tails too, a foaming and a thrashing, and soon, fish flying through the air. There are no seagulls in the fray, no crested turns spotting above. It is just a barely-moving throng of dolphin, pelican and mullet, probably. The dolphin fins move above the water, resembling the movement of sharks—about 11 fins in total—but only because the water is so shallow. A few days ago there was a brawl of young men here as part of ‘Australia Day’ celebrations. But today the dolphins, with the mullet and the pelicans, are taking it back. Brawling in their own way; passing though a real life and death moment. Some of the dolphins are right in the middle of the fray, pushing the pelicans out of the way as they pass through at speed, or turn and thrash about. One or two other fins sit a bit further away. And eventually a smaller group moves off, a mother with calf that jumps through the air landing upside down, full white-pink belly showing. They go with another, making a pod of three, leaving a further seven or eight in the slowly swirling mass behind. Every now and then a dolphin will shoot out to the side, or shoot back in, moving swiftly through the water, its fin showing, unable to dive any lower. And then in one sploshing moment, a fish—poor mullet presumable-–is hoisted by the flicking tail of a dolphin through the air for some metres to land with a splosh, lucky not to land in the open mouth of one of the two pelicans, which come flapping-spearing in with their beaks, trying to pick the odd one off.
“They’ve been there for an hour and a half,” a fellow watcher says. “The fish aren’t moving much,” I say, “I guess they’re frozen stiff.” “Stunned mullet,” my wife offers. We walk a little further on, and come across another watcher further up the cliff. “Did you see that one go flying through the air?” he asks, as another does the same. “I’ve never seen them do this here, only in the Murray.” I’ve seen them do similar things with fish (though not the tail flick) by rocks just upriver and downriver, but never on the sandbar, where I have seen them cross without diving, but not coralling-hunting like this—a kind of circling and then a shooting through. The pelicans seem to get pushed further out. Some seaguls flap around, turns begin to circle as a small dinghy anchors nearby to watch, and the kayak paddlers stroke a little closer. Everyone is watching. We move further downriver and see some nankeen night heron pushing further south, but everything else seems a little less…well…spectacular. We tell some others about it. They move to Harvey Beach and watch with us at water level, an hour after we first saw them, the fins still protruding above the surface: fins protruding, tails protruding, everything that usually belongs to the up-down movement of the depths risen to stay for longer stretches this day on a frothing foaming surface—the same as Australia Day brawling maybe—though perhaps with a little more purpose…(though I won’t say ‘porpoise’).
John Stubley 