Our friend from the Netherlands is staying with us, and we go for an evening walk along the cliffs by the river. I make a quick scan for dolphins. “Dolphins!” he says.”Where?” my wife replies. “Calling to them,” he adds. “Dolphins!” We walk on, maybe no more than a hundred metres, and then I spot some by the cliffs on the north side, heading downriver—one, two, three dolphins. We watch them come towards us, cutting across the edge of the sandbar, before they go past, heading further south. We go on to the end of our usual walk, pausing a little longer at the turnaround than we usually do; and in that time we see another pod on the other side of the river by the tree where all the night herons roost—one, two swishing around in the flatwater shallows between the yacht club jetties. “If I had the honour of naming dolphins, I’d call them Pea One, Pea Two and Pea Three,” our friend says. “Peas in a pod.” 

We turn back towards home, and within a couple of hundred metres, there are some more dolphins right in the armpit of the river—right where it bends. We can see their tails—they look to be fishing—maybe one, two, even three. “Could be the same ones. But usually if they’re heading downriver they won’t turn around and come back again.” So we’ve either seen three groups in one outing (highly unusual), or two with one group behaving very unusually—whether they’re all part of the same overall pod (they’re not usually that spread out) or different ones.

We thank the kwilena the dolphin…and our friend.

Somehow finding ourselves in Saturday morning traffic on the upriver bridge crossing in Fremantle. We’re heading south and the trucks are banked up in the left lane. I’m in the passenger seat for the first time in a long time, and I’m looking at directions on my phone. I take a moment, however, to pull myself away in order to look down at the river. The car has stopped, the traffic is so slow. And there, by the edge of the jetty in front of the Left Bank Hotel, is one small dolphin coming up for air. Then a moment later, another kwilena even closer to the shore. I watch and watch but see no more movement in the water. I look around to see if anybody else has noticed anything. There is a guy fishing nearby, who must have seen; and people on the walkway have stopped near the jetty to look at something. The car starts to move.

The things I must miss while driving.

On the day of the big wind I take an evening walk down to the river at Harvey Beach. This would be one of the few places in Perth slightly protected from this roaring southerly. While there I remember that nephew Fin has been telling me about a couple of chicks he’s been watching grow on a branch at the northern end of the beach. He says he sees an adult come in and feed them. I look in that direction and there they are—a couple of mimal darters, fairly large now, maybe both adolescents, maybe one adult and an adolescent, one of them burying its long needle-like beak into its feathers—at the end of a branch that overhangs the water, and which remains relatively still as tuart trees bluster and blow all around it. Further up the branch looks strangely white. And then, in the background, further upriver, I notice a solitary adult on another branch, on another tree. 

The next day I return, and it is one adult and one adolescent on the branch today. No other mimal seen. And today the adult one has a stick in its beak, and it’s trying to add it to the whiter part of the branch which I now see is a nest of dead twigs. But first the younger mimal has to move off the nest, and only then can the new, grey, dead stick be placed atop the others.

We’re walking upriver with a friend, and a strong south south westerly behind us. From the north west approaches boodalung the pelican, not flapping, but gliding into the wind; he gradually descends down towards the river. And down there we see one, two, three, four at least dolphins moving fast along the western edge of the sandbar; fishing, I assume. The dolphins are spread out, and gradually heading downriver. I look up again and see three more boodalung coming in from the north, flying in formation, gradually descending down onto the water above the sandbar, where they make a watery landing. This happens while the dolphins head steadily downriver along the edge of the sandbar, moving away from a boat that pursues, and past a couple of stationary others, as we head upriver at angles to the wind when the river curves and while the sun sets behind us. 

Our friend is from the north also, and heads back that way tomorrow. 

Back out at Walyunga retracing steps of a few days ago, but this time with nephew and packrafts. We hike up along the riverbank, and then cut across the dry riverbed to the island, and at the running river put the rafts in. With us throughout the day are black ducks, teals, hardheads, cormorants (black and kakak), kaa kaa, wardong, noolyarak, manatj, galama. The water levels are low and we get a good look at and feel for the granite—often below us as we run aground on the shallow rapids. The wind is against us at first, but eventually dies down. There is some rain at one point—I shelter under a low melaleuca. There are sections of tuarts all of the same size that have regrown after fire. Sheoaks—some dead—zamias and invasives. At one point in a calm open section of deeper water we lie on our backs ad paddle slowly ahead. Fin notices some eagles way up high. There are two of them. And then I notice one way up even higher than those others, almost in the clouds, almost in the blue, in the sun.

Walyunga National Park, hiking upriver to raft back down again. 
Nephew: “Is that a yet—Paific black duck?”
Me: “That’s a grey teal—ngoonan—smaller, with more rounded head. So, not yet.”
Nephew: “Not yet…but almost.”

At the end of a day following the path of a distant relative I drive from Northam through Bakers Hill, back to Toodyay Road and decide to deviate across to Walyunga National Park. I only have a couple of hours before they close the gates, so I park and walk up along the Gugglyar Avon River and keep going past all the tuarts and sheoaks and low water levels; past the teals and hardheads and galahs to where the trail moves away from the water. I decide to keep going but find there, in my unpathed path, a group of goats, one of whom has decided to brandish his horns a little. I give them some width—a herd of a dozen or more, I see now—and head further upriver, crossing on dry rocks to what would be an island during higher water levels. There I find a solitary kangaroo sleeping in the shade and sand of a tree. It gets up when it sees me and begins hopping in all sorts of directions; I can’t tell if its very young, or very old and waiting to die, or even if it might be blind. There is a deeper pool of water in the river nearby. I go back the way I came and cut in even further upriver. By now I’m aware I’m well off the track, without cell reception or a personal locator beacon, and snakes would be no surprise. But I walk on and cross the island towards the running river water on the other side, seeing a couple more kangaroos—mother and young—not really hopping away when I appear, as if I could almost touch them, as if they were not used to humans. I arrive at the water running over shallow rocks, with deeper stretches upriver. On the other side of the water is a trainline. And to me, the whole island and area feels a little untended, unloved by human hands and hearts and minds.

I take a drive following the movements of my first blood relative of this place, starting in Walyalup Fremantle, heading through Boorloo Perth, then out along the Gugglyar Avon River to Toodyay. I follow the Guggleyar further upriver to Northam and there do a lap along the river’s edge, crossing at two different bridges. There are geese and wood ducks, coots, seagulls and, in a little wetland area, white swans.

And up on the road bridge, where you can see the Mortlock River flowing into the Avon, I notice the clean white of a flying kakka-bakka spoonbill. He has something in his mouth—either a reed or a stick, and so I assume he’s building a nest. I watch him fly up to the height of the treetops by the river’s bank, come in to land, think twice, circle again, then again, before landing and coming to a halt. I lose him in the branches and leaves.

And it seemed to me at the time a long way up for such a bird to be building such a home as this.