Paying Ready Attention

A bird in the hand - two dawns.

2012-01-30T22:04:00.032+11:00

The dawns are a few days and a whole year apart. Both days begin calm and still. Both days become hot. And on both days I am up and about before most of my neighbours are awake.

On one of the last dawns of 2011 I drive through the quiet suburban streets of Melbourne. Most of the traffic seems to be rubbish and recycling trucks. Some lucky people are having their bins emptied of all the excess festive glass and paper. Mine will have to wait until next week. In the pre-dawn light all the birds are black birds, just silhouettes on gate posts and street lights.
A law abiding couple wait by a pedestrian crossing, pausing before walking across an almost empty road with a closeness that suggests a first date, or a first walk home. Their fingers interlock and they seem to gently bump into each other more often than would have be caused by mere chance. Wrapped in their couple bubble they turn down a side street and walk towards the New Year.

The boom gates are shut across a rail crossing as a train grinds out of a siding. It’s only just gone six, but the driver is already wearing a cap and dark glasses. The slightly silvered carriage slides past with dark empty windows and dark empty seats. In the last window of the last carriage a person is leaning on the glass. I wonder if they have been there all night. The sky lightens behind me as I drive through the tunnel, over the bridge and out along the freeway. The clouds catch the rising sun and glow red and orange, Turner skies without the ships or smoking industry. I can’t stop to take any pictures – and if the truth be told the speed of the freeway makes even looking an adventure sport. Once I pull over I see rays of light cutting through low clouds, streaking down towards the Earth. A white-faced heron sits on a post and looks towards the light. The gate posts and wires are black against the sky. Behind me a field of sunflowers begins to catch the day. The light is stunning, even if it is over a sewage works. The Christmas dinners of the western suburbs are probably beginning to arrive through the pumps and pipes that link houses to here. Millions of litres arrive every day, tens of thousands of birds follow, and today a group of about 20 bird banders gather as well, all together in the brightening day at a place most people would rather forget.

Most of the banders have a fashion sense that swings more towards the practical than the decorative. Gumboots – still wellies in my mind – are par for the course, even with shorts, especially with shorts. There are wide brimmed hats and tee shirts from obscure birding locations from around the world. The plumage is worn around the edges and frayed, comfortable. Nobody looks sharp and nobody cares. It’s my kind of gathering.

The night before the nets had been set where the birds have been roosting. Pushed off the mud by the high tide they had gathered in the same place for the last few days. Today, of course, they are roosting just a few meters away. But the nets are set and a few meters may as well be a light year. The birds are not there to be caught and no amount of gentle persuasion – twinkling in the lexicon of the group – can move the birds to the place we want them to be. Behind the shelter of the cars most of us sit and wait. And drink coffee. And wait. Eventually we admit defeat for the morning, and leaving the nets in place we go bird watching instead.

Crakes and rails are normally elusive birds. Reed bed screechers, path dashers, dwellers on the edge between solid mud and water, where wetlands form a soup of soil and life. Today something seems to have happened. Either the rails have had a bumper breeding year, or they have developed a taste for theatre, because they are showing all over the place. Of course they are not “showing” at all, they just happen to be feeding where we can see them. Birds do what they do for their own benefit; it’s a human conceit to think it has anything to do with us. There’s no show, just behaviour. A range of scopes and lenses are pointed at the birds – mainly Spotted Crakes, but a Baillons also puts in a brief appearance. I even manage to spot one from a moving car. Although far more confident than normal, they are still easily spooked, dashing back for cover on long, pointed toes. But they soon re-emerge to feed in the mud, peck and move, peck and move. Above their heads Australian Reed Warblers call with great vigour, but little melody. One balances on a low branch and seems to pick insects from the water’s surface. But mostly they call and call and call, hidden from view inside the reeds and telling all the others that this is their patch. An energy investment in territory and fidelity, and again done simply and only for the need of the bird.

Over the lakes and pools, ‘lagoons’ as they are rather glamorously called in a sewage works, Whiskered Terns flicker on long, pointed wings. Our most freshwater of terns, they seem to fly in loose groups, snatching at the water and darting towards things unseen in the air. The energy of waste drives this place and the thick water is dense with life. Black swans and musk dusks, grebes and cormorants, pink-eared ducks and gulls. They all gather and feed.

Down by the sea, where the river ends one journey and a new one begins, flocks of Red-Headed Avocet stand in the shallow water. Many have their slim curved bill tucked under a wing, sleeping. Some preen, some feed and some seem to do nothing at all. A light dusting of Banded Stilts is scattered through the flocks, straight billed and bright white in the sun. All the birds are just a little too far away, and the heat haze of the building day make the views less than good. A contradictory cool breeze moves through the hide windows as we eat lunch. I decline an offer of mouldy cake, sip some water and wonder about the tendency of beautiful birds to stand just too far away.
Back at the nets the waders now prove a little more cooperative, or at least more susceptible to twinkling. Soon a flock of a couple of hundred Red Necked Stints gather in the catching area. A button push, an electric surge, and the bang of gunpowder flashes the net over them. Some escape, they always do, but most are trapped. Thankfully this is dry catch. The net has deployed over smooth, dry mud and the birds are under the net rather than in it. Quickly covered in shade cloth they calm down and, one by one they are removed and placed in keeping cages. This is always the most frantic time, and there is only ever one priority – the birds.

This is a bread and butter catch, vanilla ice cream – our most commonly caught bird, but it’s still special to see. A stint from China with its hard to read soft band and a misplaced sharp-tailed sandpiper are highlights. When you hold a bird in your hand you can’t help but be struck by the outstanding improbability of the whole thing. It’s not a miracle it’s evolution – migration is a strategy called “crisis relocation”. In other words, when things are bad in one place, it’s best to be elsewhere. These little bundles of northern sunlight have abandoned their breeding grounds as the summer failed, and headed south for better days. It makes sense really.

For a day forecast to be over 40 it started with a surprising chill. It sent me back into the house for a jumper of sorts, it made me glad I had made some coffee. I was up even earlier this time, and the roads were quieter still. This time I drive east, out along the freeway towards the sun. Out through an industrial hinterland full of square buildings designed with the subtlety of a shoe-box and the grace of a sly kick. I am surprised to see people already waiting in a golf course car park. Waiting to play a round of the world’s second dullest game. (Rugby league in case you wondered about the first).

In faint hollows and slight valleys a mist gathers, its flexible fingers sometimes reaching out towards and over the road. This is a flat land, where landscape is measured in inches, and the slight differences are normally hidden. I am passed by a convoy of boat trailers - fishermen heading for the morning tides. Eventually I pull off the road and park, and we gather for the briefing. We bump over rough paddocks and farm land and park behind a screen of tall plants.
The nets are already in place, and we approach with care and caution. The tall plants are no longer habitat, they are cover, and the landscape becomes terrain as we inch forward. Apart from the crackle of the radios and occasional beeps and clicks from cameras all is quiet. I lie back in the grass and look at the brown yellow of the stalks and the blue of the sky. Pure Australian summer. A Swamp Harrier quarters the fields and Silver gulls call. “Get ready” comes over the radio and we sit or crouch depending on age. The cannons fire and we are off. It’s only a short dash to the net, but it needs to be even quicker than normal.

The birds – Red-Necked Avocets – were roosting in water and the net needs to be taken off sooner than soon. Some people are already stood in thigh deep water and others are lifting the middle section into the air. The birds make a dash for the dry land provided by the “tent” and they are safe. Two or three make bids from freedom out the side of the net. Some succeed, some end up in the cooler. The normal level of activity is ramped up even higher until the birds are safe and covered. Thankfully taking the birds from the net is like “shelling peas” – easy and rapid. The day has grown warm already as we start to process the birds. A sense of haste remains, as the birds can’t be kept for more than a couple of hours in the keeping cages. They develop problems with their legs if they are.

These are stunningly beautiful birds. The long reversed curved beaks turn with a final flourish at the end, and the long legs are blue grey. The very tip of the bill is thinner than a single grain of sand. Their heads vary in gingerness – a sign of their age - and some have speckled necks. Red-Headed Avocets breed whenever the conditions are correct – true opportunists – so the flock is a mix of adults and the very young, almost adults and not really juveniles. Compared to the northern visitors this is a highly variable flock of birds, showing that the idea of breeding season may not always apply in Australia, where the variation of rain and drought are not the same as elsewhere in the world. There are also three Banded Stilts in the flock, a great by-catch, and another classic boom and bust breeder.

By the middle of the morning we have processed, banded and flagged over 170 avocet. This is the largest single catch of this species ever made – I’m on the phone to Guinness Book of Records but they seem more interested in nail swallowing or naked bear wresting.
The birds gather in the shallow water, washing the human memory from their feathers, preening and fussing at their wings. It’s eleven in the morning and it’s already almost 40. I tip some water over my head, trying to wash away the heat. We bump back over the fields to the freeway. I turn on the cricket and head for home. The birds are still in the sea, waiting for the chance of climate and food to come together once more, bearing little orange flags that we hope will help us know them better.

A sock in the washer.

2012-01-08T18:22:00.013+11:00

Out in the car park Musk Lorikeets chatter in the trees, higher pitched and less terse than their Rainbow cousins. Some flutter their wings in submission or possibly courtship. Some dash along the length of branches in short sharp movements, their feet hidden by fluttering wings. They look like second rate stop frame animations, where all the money has been spent on colour rather than continuity. Their short pointy bodies and short pointy tails turn them into flying crosses. They fill the morning quiet with their voices and the morning sky with their wings. I pause to watch, then walk towards the pool.

The glide off the wall is a silky surge of freedom. You pop up to the surface, take one stroke and breathe. Three strokes, right. Three strokes, left. Repeat, repeat, repeat. I reach the far end and turn gracelessly. A fumble turn. Glide, stroke and breathe. Use your feet more. Lift your elbows. Watch the way your hands enter the water. Be here now, in this moment. Not watching TV in a hope that the time will pass, not counting seconds of sprinting. Arm over arm, kick after kick. The minutes pass and I try to keep going. Old men who have swum everyday for the past God knows how long plough up and down. Younger people with worse technique and less stamina than me rest at the wall. Eventually I join them. But it’s a later ‘eventually’ than last week. I dream of otters, of salmon, even of narwhal. I keep swimming.

Out in the car park the Musk Lorikeets are still there, with Noisy Miners and Wattle Birds. On the gravel path a small flock of sparrows half jump, half fly from puddle to puddle. Red Rumped Parrots look for seeds on the edges of the oval, and in the distance I hear a Butcher Bird. A dog Fox – or possibly a foxy dog – trots across the road in front of me. It sniffs the body of a dead possum and keeps walking. As I wait for a green arrow I see it walk over the cricket square, move down to fine leg and disappear over the boundary. Six and out. As I pull into my own driveway the car clock flicks over to 7.45 am. As I open the front door I can smell toast. It’s a good way to start the day.

Later in the week I swim in the ocean. Technically its summer, but you would be hard pressed to know. 7mm of neoprene should do the job. The wetsuits are blue on the inside and black on the outside, and I hope that they will stop me going blue on the inside. I help H into his suit. His arms stick out at a strange angle and I assume mine do as well. We waddle down to the Pier. We are at Portsea again, looking for sea dragons. The wind pushes the water against the shore and the sea looks choppy and dark. For reasons that I fail to understand at the time we are going to jump into the sea from a low platform rather than wade in from the shore. There are two other families with us and they seem less than keen to get in. So I go first.

There is only a slight northward migration of parts of my body as I enter the water which surprises me. The group leader had described the water as brisk, a word I had taken to mean almost debilitatingly cold. H jumps in after me and almost lands on my head. After a few moments of shock we both start to swim around. The other families still seem less than keen. Eventually everybody is in the water. The waves which looked choppy from the shore now look much larger. My eyes are at water level and the waves are way over the top of my head. Me and H bob like small corks in the water – we swap OK signs and head for the pier. It quickly becomes clear that the water is not. It’s a murky soup of foam and falling sand, of swirling bubbles and floating weed. The swell from the wind pushes us uncomfortably close to the wooded piles of the pier. I catch a brief glimpse of small fish and coloured weeds. I get a much closer view of somebody else’s fins as they kick me in the face. We head away from the pier and out towards more open water. In the open water I feel even smaller than before. The shore is really not that far away but you still lose sight of it in the dips of the waves. People cling on to the floating ring we have brought with us. This increases the sense that we are in a ship wreck of some kind.

A few small fish dart away into the weeds and we find a sea urchin and a star fish. But mostly we just see waves. In a miracle of observation we find a Flathead in the weeds. Named with a wonderful economy, this fish has a flat head and most the rest of it is flat as well. They make good eating, but after a few minutes it moves off and disappears into the gloom. Some of the other snorkelers move off as well and head back to shore, beaten by the chill of the water and their unwillingness to swim to keep warm. H is doing OK, but I can tell he is not having the best of days. We head back to swim beside the pier. There are more fish here, but it’s just not a good day.

When we try to get out of the water and on to the beach the waves bounce us around and taking off the fins is a nightmare. H gets cast up on some rocks and looks less than pleased. I fall over and H cracks up. We both end up being bounced around in the surf like socks in a washer. The other swimmers are gone by the time we get back to base and stand under thankfully warm water. We struggle with the wet suits and think of coffee or chocolate.But strangely it is a good day. Not everything goes to plan, but that’s normal. Wildlife is unpredictable – if you want certainty, go to a zoo. The water was cold, but it’s possible (for a while at least) to look after yourself in the ocean. In the car on the way home we spend as much time talking about the day as if we had seem heaps of stuff.

The next morning as I glide off the pool wall I find myself laughing. I can see us bobbing in the water, like half drowned corks, trying to make the best of it. I take a breath and keep on swimming.

Accidentally West.

2011-12-22T21:27:00.027+11:00

A butterfly flaps its wings on the down slope of the Himalayas and later, far out to sea, a storm forms where one would not have been. The storm alters lives, but nobody blames the butterfly. John is attacked by a feral wheelbarrow and comes off second best. Later, but not that far away, I board a plane for Perth. My week changes, but I don’t blame the wheelbarrow. The tic, tac, toe of chaos marks out the squares across our lives. We think we are in control, but that seems to be a myth. Chaos is not in control either, but it does lie outside the door of order, scratching like a dog on a cold night. Desperate to be let in. Keen to enter our lives.

I arrive at the airport and check myself in. In a strange and marvellous plan the airline aims to improve its customer service by removing all contact with their staff. I suppose I could just shout at myself when my booking can’t be found, or ask to see my own supervisor to sort out any problems. But thankfully all goes smoothly. I recommend myself for a pay rise and go to find a coffee. The sparrows, which used to look down on the passenger queues, have shifted their disdain from the departure lounge to the coffee bar. Over double shot skinny mocha lattes they cast a critical eye over the passing hoards. To their chuckles I order my own coffee and feel thankful that I did not order a cappuccino. A mother struggles with three small children. The first is crying the inconsolable sobs of a child who has just realised that her beloved cuddly rhino has been left at home. In an unrelated trauma the second child is about to punch the third. In a few hours these kids will be glad that their mother has only been given plastic cutlery. I pray that they are not on my flight. There are no atheists in the departure lounge.

To avoid the possibility of having to give evidence in a murder trial I wander around the shops. Surely this must be the nadir of western civilisation. A place where the only way you can pass the time is to go shopping for things that you don’t need. Things that you will have to carry for the next however many hours in slowly disintegrating hand luggage, before throwing them in a bin or, at best, at the back of a cupboard, never to be seen again. Airport shopping is a sign of a culture in terminal decline. I read four pages of my book and realise that it is unimaginably dull. My spirits sag. I consider going shopping.

The call to board the plane comes as a relief and at the door of the plane I am finally spoken to by a member of the airline staff. “Down on the left, sir” – ah, the joy of human contact. People struggle to put grand pianos, entire V6 engine blocks and other things manifestly larger than the maximum size of cabin baggage into the overhead lockers. I help an old lady safely stow a fridge / freezer. She tells me it’s for her daughter. Ah, that’s all right then.
My seat is the outside of a double, an aisle seat thankfully. The window seat is occupied by a solid looking man with dark hair and a darker expression. I say “hello” and he turns to look at me with a practised glacial slowness which seems to be intended to unsettle. It works. He looks at me in a way that suggests he only just recognises me as a human being, and that any further attempt at conversation will result in my death. I realise that I may be in for a long flight.

Whoever said it is better to travel than to arrive never sat in economy on a Sunday afternoon. I flick through the channels on the seat back TV and pass an hour until some food arrives. My sullen travel companion does not get the meal of his choice, and I can feel the seat shaking. I steal a glance at his tray table and notice that he has arranged his knife and fork in what would be best described as “attack posture”. With one sweet single motion he could pick both of them up with his left hand and sink then into the middle of my chest. I try to eat my peas with a fork, but without moving my arms at the shoulders. Why do they serve one of the world’s only spherical foods on planes where there is no room for the acrobatics needed to get the damn things into your mouth? For all the enjoyment to be had from airplane food they may as well just puree the stuff and just give you a straw. “Not one of your most enjoyable offerings” Mr. Grumpy says to the hostess. I can see discomfort in her eyes. She also seems to be putting on a Kevlar flak jacket.

In a rare moment of humour the pilot welcomes us to Perth after “what I can only describe as an excellent landing”. We are warned to check that the bags in the overhead lockers have not moved. A young man with tatts and a high visibility waistcoat ignores the advice and is almost killed by an anvil. My silent travelling companion reaches for his strangely triangular bag. I suspect it may be a bespoke bag for carrying horses’ heads.

I meet up with my work colleague at the baggage carousel. His bag looks like the kind of case that contains nuclear devices in spy movies – metallic silver, tough and probably ticking. Although the rainbow strip strap around it makes it look less than sinister. My bag looks identical to everybody else’s. I immediately grasp the value of travelling with a bag disguised as a thermonuclear weapon – nobody is keen to steal it from the carousel! After a few false starts I finally collect my bag, and with a genuine sense of relief I head for the hotel. This is my second trip to Perth. The second time I have been here for work, and the second time that I have noticed how bright the light is here. My hotel is opposite the convention centre which is hosting an international conference on corrosion. Over dinner I hear talk of oxidation and reduction and sacrificial anodes. Galvanised by this conversation I go for a walk. The city skyline here is almost uniformly modern, shiny and reflective. A few older buildings are scattered in the mix, mostly dwarfed by their neighbours, the only curves in an ocean of straight lines. The atmosphere is young, possibly adolescent, but clearly energetic. It feels a bit like visiting your teenage brother and meeting all his mates for a night out. It’s a real contrast to Melbourne which seems more sedate, less ambitious, less self consciously rich. If Perth is your adolescent brother, Melbourne is your slightly middle aged aunt. Albeit an aunt that has connections to organised crime and likes motor sport, but an aunt none the less.

I have dinner with a breezy view of the Swan River, with gulls and loud music for company. I like the gulls, but the other I can do without. I don’t think you can tell how important a river is to a city until you watch it from above. Then you can see how the river and city work with each other. Do they fight? Do they blend?

The next night I walk up to Kings Park, which overlooks the city and attracts crowds on early summer evenings. I arrive just in time to see my chosen restaurant close. Ah. An avenue of smooth trees leads toward statues remembering past wars and hoping for lasting peace. Towards monuments remembering modern violence and rejecting the ignorance of intolerance, the casual brutality of the hidden bomb. Queen Victoria, World Wars and Bali side by side in a green space full of families and their often laughing voices. From inside the Bali monument you can look down on the city as the sun sets. Bright and shiny, modern and clean. I can’t help but be struck by how far we have come. As I turn to walk away, the walls around me remind me of how far we have yet to go.

On low growing plants Red Wattlebirds probe the robust red flowers - the colour and form a clue that the plants are pollinated by birds, the lack of scent another pointer. The wattle bird seems to show its reptile heritage more than most – the pattern on the wings, or the empty look in their eyes. Rainbow Lorikeets, an introduction from the east coast, flash between the trees with rapid blurring wing beats. Glossy black Ravens hop and skip on the grass, moving from picnic to picnic in search of food. A crumb here, a crust there. Some people throw food to the birds, some throw food at the birds. Kids. Family. Food. I don’t have these with me tonight. I head back down the hill.

Cutting a zig zag path down the hill is a set of steps called Jacob’s Ladder. It seems to be popular with runners who are sweating up and down the many dozen steps from top to bottom. Some pause half way, some don’t get that far. One carries a 20 kg weight in his arms. This seems a commitment beyond the call of duty, but he seems to carry the load with pride. The top of the steps is all serenity and memory, the bottom a tangle of roads and underpasses. There are brief glimpses of water on the way down – lakes and wetlands on the other side of the road. The path back to the hotel leads through dusty under bridges and over roads still busy with traffic. A group proudly wearing their Corrosion Conference name tags walks in the other direction. They seem to be happy, they seem to be getting ready for a big night – clearly ‘rust never sleeps’.

The next day I visit the wetlands by the roads. Back through the dark underspaces of bridges and footpaths. A magpie lark harasses a raven with a vigour which belies its size. Car noises echo from the bridge piles and an old man settles down for the night. The footpath becomes a bike lane and the sharp single ring of a bell signals the approach of another rider. It’s a shared pathway, but I feel out of place. I’m glad to get off the track and start walking around the lake.
The lake seems almost unnaturally green. Not green in a toxic sludge kind of way, but green in a life bursting, sustaining kind of way. In the quieter moments you can almost hear photosynthesis underway. The tearing of water molecules, the melding of hydrogen and public enemy number one, carbon dioxide. The place fizzes with oxygen and life. Down in the pond’s deeper depths you can imagine coal forming, slow and steady. Dragonflies flash past, and pause fleetingly on mud, marsh or stem tops. The whole place seems a counterfeit of the carboniferous.

The pond edge is thick with the movement of small fish. Slivers of life preyed upon by snake birds and grebes. One long necked, one short and stumpy. The grebe dives and swims, pushed by leaf feet and silvered by the air trapped in its feathers. When it reappears it shakes with a surprising violence that dimples the surface and scatters the clinging water. A night heron waits, primed in ambush for the unwary or the unlucky. Perched low to the water it waits and waits and waits. I move closer and for once it stays still. A bike rider in flame orange seems to upset it, and it walks deeper into its bank side bush. I never see it catch a fish.

Dusky Moorhen chicks follow their parents and are fed scraps of green. They peck here and there but seem to prefer to have their food chosen for them. Hardheads, cormorants, pacific black ducks – all passing on the energy trapped by the alchemy of photosynthesis, all pass their days within the sound shot of passing traffic, bike bells and the click of a camera.

The pond seems old, gentle and connected. I walk back towards my hotel, through streets that seem to be none of these. For all the bright modernity about me, it’s this little piece of the past that I will remember about Perth this time.

As if the stars had fallen

2011-12-03T19:03:00.016+11:00

Nothing changes a landscape like darkness. As the primacy of the eye gives way the more subtle arts of ear and hand, as the surety of footfall morphs into the uncertain step, the world changes. For country dwellers the change may be less marked, used as they are to the changing of the day, but for city kids and urbanised adults the darkness of night is both unusual and scarce. From pools of yellow streetlights to the blue glow of TV’s, cities are full of light. The country is a different matter.

Down on Johanna beach at the failing of the light, the night and day merge uncertainly, with little ebbs and flows. Day hangs on to the western horizon and lights up the sky for one last hour. The colours reflect in the wet sand beach and hold on for one last minute. The surf break glows for one last second . And then, with the sun below the horizon, just a strip of light remains. The foam of the breaking waves seems to pick up the last few rays of light and glow, faint and even ghostly, into the darkness. They bring the waves of last light to the shore. Against the strange night light of the sky even the silver gulls are cast as black. Magpies carol from the dunes, and somewhere down the beach a lapwing calls in stress and alarm. This would be a night for whale song and stories, for the long reflective stare out towards the nothingness of the horizon. It would be a night for company. It would be a night to talk of the past and plan for the future. But with only the gulls and the waves, the sea and the darkened sky for company I walk back towards the cottage.

The eye takes back its primacy as I see the window light on the hill. Warm on a chill night with a sharp wind. Cows cough off to my left, in a way that suggests surprise or ambush. I woke one night, long ago, to a similar cough and watched deer walk through the campsite we were in. A dozen or more children and half as many adults sleeping under the stars – and three passing deer on their night time duties. The kids were buried in their sleeping bags, as much for security as warmth, and many of the adults were less comfortable than they claimed. In the morning no one else had heard or seen a thing. But the footprints were there, clear in the mud. I wondered why they had woken me and no one else. At that time I spent most of my time outdoors and regularly slept under the summer trees. Did that familiarity let me notice something new, even as I slept? If the same thing happened today, in the less familiar woodlands of Australia, would I wake? Or would I huddle in my bag, as much for security as warmth, and miss what the darkness brings?
Overhead the low evening clouds are grey and seem full of rain. Off in the distance the sun still shines, low and soft. It’s a sky that promises rainbows, and on this evening I’m in the right place at the right time. The skylight arch of colour is bright and clear, with a second, a shy sibling, higher and behind. The twice refracted light makes sky art at its best. It’s no less stunning for not being the work of God or the bright hand of an augury. It’s not a metaphor, it’s pure physics. And it’s still stunningly beautiful. The brighter of the two seems to cleave the edge of the sky – grey one side, blue the other. The moment I step from the car rain drops fall, fat and heavy. A short sharp shower over Lavers Hill, a passing storm, a clearing storm. The rainbow hangs over the hill and the gold pot seems in reach. We eat dinner in a pub, a curious mixture of the welcoming and the distant. We are welcomed in the bar by being shown we really should be elsewhere. The food is OK – “sound, but unremarkable” – a little more the fuel, but much less than art.

As the darkness gathers we pull into the car park of Melba Gully. Disappointingly there are two cars already there. The rain now falls from the leaves rather than the sky, and around the car bays you can hear the faint pitter tap of falling water. We get briefly lost in the car park – tangled in the switch back paths intended for wheel chair users. Eventually we find our way through the well intentioned maze and walk into the gully. These rainforest gullies are damp places, and for all the fact that this one has a path through it, they retain the feel of secret places. Old trees, not touched by fire, grow by the path side and tree-ferns hang over the path’s edge. For all their mystery these gullies are not untouched. The loggers axe and saw have left their mark, and in the daylight hours you can find odd, letter box shaped slots cut into the base of old tree stumps. These are where boards were forced into the wood to give a platform for the loggers. Now the stumps, often startlingly large, slowly rot back into the forest.

But in the darkness such things are only known, not seen. The kids, obsessed with light, need to be persuaded not to turn on their torches. Often the persuasion does not work. Slowly, as we walk deeper into the gully, it becomes darker and darker and eventually we find the stars. Not in the cloudy sky, but in the darkness of the path’s edge, where the tree ferns curtain the bank side. First one, then two, then many points of light come into view. An inquisitive torch light shows nothing, and when it is darkened, and your eyes have adjusted, the lights come back. It’s as if the stars had fallen and left their light in tiny sparkles. The truth is no less strange. The lights are glow worms – tiny specks of biological light that form constellations and galaxies in the darkness by the pathways.

The far end of the gully is marked by a waterfall and here the glow worms shine in greater numbers. They swirl along the edges of the stream and progress along fallen logs. The more you look the more you find, like looking out into space or back into time. The kids are surprisingly quiet. The torches remain off. With 20 minutes of darkness behind you it’s possible to see the little lights deep within the forest.

If I saw such things and did not know what they were, what stories would I invent to explain what I had seen? What fables would grow from these darkened gullies, where on this evening the stars did really seem to be in reach.

Change while the nation stops

2011-11-17T19:00:00.025+11:00

It’s the perfect traffic storm, and once more, at the start of a long weekend, I’m stuck right in the middle of it. Red taillights. Rainbow car colours. Jaguars. Silver top taxis. The speedo needle becomes a weather vein of discontent. I Play some new music but it leaves me Cold. Some song about Pandas, Pandas, Pppaaaaanandas. It rains heavily. When we do move the spray is thick. What lies beyond my own bonnet is speculative. I change discs for the Archangel. And the Red Rain is coming down, coming down all over me. Later a car cuts through the traffic left and right, fish tails, straightens and drives on. I slow even more and think about braking distances, lack of traction and the occasional failure of natural selection. I try not to embrace the collective drop in IQ that heavy rain brings on in drivers. A journey of 90 minutes takes three hours. I arrive tired. But I do arrive. It keeps raining.

Was it a bad journey or a normal journey on a bad night? Is this a rainy night or am I so used to dry ones that I have forgotten the reality of a wet road? How can we see what is change and what is normal? I’ve seen more rain in the last two years than in the other 13 I’ve lived in Australia. For me normal is dry and raining is different. Walking home in drenching rain a novelty, walking home drenched in sweat much more normal. I think about these things as I go
to sleep.

I wake to the normal / abnormal sound of rain on the roof and the sight of heavy grey skies. I start thinking again. How do we keep track of change in the natural world? Not the day to day changes of weather or the slow change of seasons, but the longer change of climate and growth. Can you really watch a place turn from grass to trees? Or does it happen suddenly in your mind when you realise a meadow is now a forest? Is this part of the problem when people talk of climate change, that our brains are not wired to see change over this time scale?

For most of the history of humanity I’d already be dead. The three score years and ten is a modern invention and to live beyond that age is an issue only of the current day. But our brains seem not to know this. In another time I would have in all probability died in childhood – vast numbers of people did. An early death and a youthful old age must have been common. And if you don’t live for more than 30 years how could the brain evolve to cope with changes that take place over dozens of decades or hundreds of years. Maybe we should ask the trees what they think – and if we look at their rings they can tell us what they know in the language of growth. Maybe we should ask the trees that felt the touch of animals now long gone and stood as watchers as the world turned and turned and turned.

When the rain stops we go for a walk around the point to the lighthouse. A walk only possible because of the turn of the tide. That’s a change you can understand. On the cliffs a huge slab of rock hugs the stones below it. Last week it started its journey down to the beach. But how long will it have to be there before people forget that it was not ever thus? Will it get a name – the table – and be visited for year after year by the same people? How long before the cliffs again take on the myth of permanence as they creep day by day inland? The rocks are old in a way we cannot really know and even if we can name the age does it really mean anything? Does five million years old really mean something different to just “old”? The rocks have been carved by the long slow hands of the sea and wind. Shapes form where none were before, and if chance shapes them in a way we like, they will be named. And somehow we think that naming will fix them. It becomes news worthy if they fall or change, but we forget that they were made because of change and that they will fall in the same way.

The beach below the cliffs seems to have less sand than normal and the city shapes of rocks poke through. Limpets clamp on to small depressions and lines in the rock. Tiny blue grey snails gather in lines where ancient changes made the rock weak and present a shadow of protection. Each wave brings in a small fleck of change. Change upon change upon change. Chance upon chance upon chance until we reach today and then we can look back on the winding path that brought us here.

Beyond the lighthouse the ruins of a war bunker look out to sea. Built to defend against a threat that never came to this coast. Build by a generation who must have thought it normal to go to war as their fathers and grandfathers had done. My kids corrupt its purpose and invite us in for tea and cakes. As I feed on their imagination I wonder what would have happened if a steel grey armada had sailed over the horizon and come here to wage war. In places like this the shadow of history seems much longer than normal. A sail boat passes where the battleships never came and I turn back to my kids as they offer me more tea and more cakes.

Back at the beach the gulls gather at the tide wash and search for dinner, the small waves turning over sand, revealing food. Squabbles break out over choice morsels found by the lucky or overlooked by the angry. On a fence a pair keeps watch for any change of chance. Looking one way, then another, then at each other. The necessary vigil of the chancer. Off shore a sunken boat, the Ozone, breaks down through the familiar alchemy of sun and salt and sea. It was sunk to provide protection from the forces of change, but now it’s all but overwhelmed. I plan to return in the summer for a closer look.

The kids play on the beach, larger than last year with more words. They can both read, they can both swim. The kids that are here now did not exist last year. This change is wonderful and strange to watch. Would I hold back change if I could – to spend more time here and now? To regain some of the moments lost to fear and to a barking black dog? I really don’t know.
This weekend was born from the Race that Stops the Nation. But does anything really ever stop? We may come back to the same places but we and it have changed. The only constant is change. Change keeps the world as it is; without it all things would tumble down to nothing. Change is the engine of the world.

We drive away, leaving behind a fleece jumper, a toy car, a book of stories and a single pink sock. Or maybe we left some of those behind last time. Or the time before.

Hello Johanna

2011-11-03T20:30:00.028+11:00

I’ve been to the Otways before, but never to Johanna. It all seemed sort of familiar, but it really wasn’t. It’s only when you get ready for bed that you really begin to notice the differences. Before that it’s been a rush to get the car unpacked, find the light switches and work out how to turn on the oven. Eventually the kids are asleep and you can wind down from the day and go to bed. You get into the same side as at home, with the same book and bookmark, maybe even with the same clock. A glass of water on the bedside table. The same back and forth of conversation and plans for the next day. The same hissing flick of turning pages. But as you settle in the differences come to the fore. The sounds of the house settling down for the night are different. Logs crack and fall in the fire box, the bedside lamp may buzz. The dishwasher rattles and sings quietly until you turn off the light and then, in the darkness, it sounds like an express train – this is a strange phenomenon, but it seems to happen in every house I visit.

But mainly the difference comes from outside, and here the difference is the voice of the sea. As it grows dark – or as I become sleepy – the sea’s voice seems to come closer and closer until it whispers in my ear. A sound that is both gentle and violent. The in and the out of the ocean. A sea breathe. I always sleep well near the sea. Some people say it’s the sea air, I say it’s the sea sound. Like a lullaby from years and years ago, the sea’s voice reaches in and puts me to sleep. (Many years ago I lived on an island, almost on the western edge of Europe, surrounded by the sea – and its call was never silent. When I left and the voice was no longer there, I missed it, I felt lonely without it. Strangely I found an echo of it in the distant noise of traffic that was always there in the next place I stayed. In a place that had seen better days and felt ignored by the rest of the country I may have been making the best of a bad job, but that’s what happened).

As ever the kids arrive early and fill the space in the bed. Outside the sea calls. But there is something else as well, a gentle tapping and the buzz, rattle of wings from the window. When the blinds are open a tiny blue streak dashes away into the nearby bushes – it’s a Superb Blue Wren. Within minutes it has returned, pecking at the angle between glass and frame, a fragment here, a portion there. Every so often the bird would notice its own reflection, and driven by the hormonal imperative to defend place and space it would attack itself. With its beak pushed against the glass it would fly up in a whirl of tiny wings. Enragingly its reflection would do the same. For reasons as inexplicable as those that started the whole process it would end and the bird would drop back to the window sill and start feeding again. Later in the week I would watch the same bird (but how would I really know!) doing the same thing around the edge of the car’s windscreen. Food, frenzy and fighting all at the same time.

The beach was only a short walk away, ten minutes at the most and almost all downhill. Short steep uphills marked the slopes of old sand dunes, covered now in thick spongy grass. In places cows had poached the soil – around gates and feed troughs, along favourite pathways – and the sand broke through to the surface. For kids used only to cows on TV the real things are surprisingly large. And noisy. And smelly. I’m sure that the cows were thinking similar things about the kids.

The beach was that picture perfect combination of rock, sand and surf that lures people to their death somewhere around our coast every year. A deep tongue of greenish water cut past a rock bar and back out to sea. To fishermen this is a gutter – to most everybody else it’s a rip. Name it as you will, but it’s an undertow counter current that takes water – and you if you’re in it – away from the sand and back out to sea. It’s a naturally produced device to collect fish and drown the unwary. The water that gathers on the shore with each breaking wave takes the easiest route back to the deeper ocean, and the rock bar on the beach provides both a barrier and an opportunity. Being caught in a rip is like being trapped on a liquid conveyer belt, with a destination far off shore. Even in their smallest form you can feel the pull, and understand how water, soft and inviting one minute, can be deadly the next. You can feel how water can carve away the land and mock the defences that we put up to protect the coast. I fished near the edge of this rip later in the week (unsuccessfully again!), but knew not to wade too deep. And I retreated further up the beach than normal to await the bites that never came. For all the benefits brought by experiential learning, being trapped in a rip is something I can do without. RIP, rip. It’s probably a coincidence, but that does not mean it’s not significant.

On the other side rock bar that helps funnel the rip, the Johanna River comes down to the sea. It winds about as the beach levels out and dawdles a little before it meets the waves. Silver Gulls peck at the river’s edge and where the water comes through the dunes a White Faced Heron stands and watches. All the birds seem more timid than normal – maybe this beach is not as popular as others. The birds seem less used to humans, less acclimated to beach runners and splashing children. On the other side of the river a pair of Hooded Plovers run and peck. I don’t feel like wading today so the birds stay just a little too far away. The Plovers don’t do well on popular beaches – too much disturbance when nesting, too many misplaced feet, too many prying eyes. Just too much humanity. In the end they spook when a bird of prey flashes out of the sand dunes. They land a few hundred meters down the beach and start feeding again. Their lives a knife edge balance between the wasted energy of unneeded fear and the need to feed. Too much bravery and they get eaten, too much fear and they never have time to feed.

The kids are playing in the distance as we walk back to the cottage. This time the interest comes not from the size of the cows, but the sheer volume of snot running from their noses – that’s the cows’ noses just to be clear. That unique combination of revulsion and fascination keeps them interested - and in this case this could apply to both the cows and the kids!

Although the air is still, patches of grass shake and wave. What’sgoing on? Random patches of greenery move in ways that they should not. Silvereyes, small grey green birds, move through the plants with mouse-like movements. Darting from place to place, constantly on the move, constantly feeding – just like the plovers on the beach. When we get back to the cottage another flock is feeding in the flowerbeds that ring the front door. Many shots later I manage to capture a few of these fleeting birds. Overhead an Australasian Hobby flashes past, small and swift with glowing red brown underside. Tracking it was difficult with binoculars, but was next to impossible with a camera. It flies in straight lines and sweeping arcs, interrupted by sudden unpredictable jinks to the left or right. Each of these violent shifts marks an attack on a dragonfly. Eventually I watch the bird snatch a dragonfly in flight and eat it on the wing. It barely slows during the process. Fast food. The sun sets and we settle down for the evening, the sea grumbling in the background and the wind pushing the clouds into piles and pillars.

The next morning we set off on the short walk to feed the chickens and a longer walk to look for platypus. The chickens proved far more accommodating than the platypus. Standing looking across the fields the kids don’t know which way to go. Dozens of small paths flow out from the mud around the gate – cow paths that fan out to each corner of the green. “We need to go this way” I say. “Are you sure?” the kids ask. I realise that this is normal for me and very strange for them. As a kid I would wander around the fields and woods that surrounded my village. While there were marked paths, many were just smoothed lines in an otherwise rough field. You often wandered off the path when you wanted to go where the path did not. A walk would be a series of decisions that you made yourself. Over this farm gate, through that patch of woodland, along this stream until we can get over it. These were walks where you needed to “read” where you were going. It’s not that you were going to get lost; in fact you often found more than you lost. But unless you read the land you may not end up where you planned to be.

Most of the walks my kids have been on have followed paths that were built and maintained with the express purpose of getting to the place you were going. Tourist paths in National Parks are still controlled by the lie of the land, but they have been built with a more logical plan than those in the English countryside. They do not encourage wandering. They encourage movement. We follow no path at all but drop down a narrow spur, past a bridge and over a hill. It’s clear we are going in the right direction because we get to where we want to be. You could have probably got to that point dozens of other ways. This, and the small folded nature of the land, reminds me of England. The trees and the birds tell me I am elsewhere.

As we return to the cottage P finds an echidna. For all the memories and familiar wandering paths I can only be in one place in the world. All illusions to the contrary are false, all memories are simply that. I see the place for where it is, and say, once more, “Hello, Johanna”.

On Echidnas, orchids and a possible Frenchman

2011-10-10T21:07:00.042+11:00

It was Friday and I was stuck in traffic. I engaged third gear for the first time in a while and almost immediately depressed the clutch. I drifted to a halt about 50m closer to the Grampians. At this rate it was going to be a long evening. The car in front of me had a broken driver’s-side brake light. The driver to my left had a beard and to my right sat a Carlton supporter. Up ahead the blue and red flashing light meant that somebody was having a worse night than me. One brake light man nipped into a gap to his left and moved twenty meters forward. Beard man seemed to be shouting into his phone. Flocks of silver gulls flew with heavy lazy wings towards the river. Two pelicans drifted past. Eventually the movement started to outlast the pauses, and we went forward. People gathered around the crumpled front of a damaged car and pointed at the crumpled rear of another. Cause and effect. A bad way to start the weekend. I pulled round the witch’s hats as a man swept red glass from the road.

The sky was clear, but dull, as if the sun could not really be bothered for the last hour of the day. Colours faded down to a grey scale of tone as the sky darkened. One patch of cloud glows faintly pink. Night falls without sunset fanfare and I drive on. The tyres whoosh on the road and double chop over seams and bumps. The sat nav says things that I already know, but I keep it on anyway, more for company than necessity. Moths flutter flash in the headlights, and sometimes eyes shine from the sides of the roads. Something glides across the road – an owl maybe. A fox, fleet and four footed, pauses mid-road to stare me down. The white lines flicker past.

I turn on the music and sing to songs from another time. It’s a pleasure best taken alone. I turn on the radio and listen. The announcer stumbles over his words. He needs a coffee and so do I. The night air is clear as I stop at some roadside way station. Like most journeys I wish it was over, but I can’t wish away either the time or the miles. I make the final turn at Stawell to Halls Gap. Prime kangaroo country – kanga-bangers as I heard them called – prime RTA country. I drift a little to the right, hold the middle ground and drive on. One last set of eyes, one last hard brake and I arrive. A bobook owl calls its name in the darkness and the milky way clouds the clear sky. I unpack and settle in. I hear the siren call of football finals and relax before the TV. I pass the evening with two German PhD students – who with almost perfect comedic style are a Hamburger and a Frankfurter! As I settle down to sleep I can hear the rush of the wind and the repeated call of the owl.

I awake to the rush of the wind and the distant, floating calls of corellas. I dance around the other people in the kitchen as I make breakfast and drink tea. I feel old and somewhat out of place. I feel strangely foreign in a crowd of Germans, Japanese and Americans. As usual, people ask if I am Irish – and for the umpteenth time I explain that no, I am not, but that I am blessed with a regional accent. More than anything else I think you need a small personal space in a youth hostel. Morning rituals are probably best abandoned. Hot water is made to be shared and your plans for the day are dissected. Advice is sought and given, and somehow in the chaos everybody gets out the door.

I drive north with only a vague idea of where I am going. Not having the kids in tow means no real plans; I can stop where the fancy takes me. The land has been burnt and flooded. Some roads are still closed and many of the trees have a wrapping of new growth leaves. The car bounces over ruts and bumps, it rocks side to side in the gusts of wind. It’s a wild day, a forceful day. I pull over, roll down the window and listen. Above the wind I can hear the call of a Fan Tailed Cuckoo – sad and distant. Even with the wind it seems quiet compared to the tyre noise and bumping of the un-made road.

In the end I settle on the walk to Mt Stapylton. The path leads over solid rock towards a deep bowl of land. Natural gutters flush water down the surface. In places water pools in depressions and hollows. Plants grow in lines and patches, chasing the water. Thousands of feet must have come this way, because the path is marked by a pale streak up the rock as well and little red triangles of paint. A polish point path of the journeys of other feet. Native mint, a splash of purple, lights up the pathway. In the distance it looks strangely out of place, a paint splash of colour against the rock. The wind flaps and waves the plants, and a green grasshopper and its companion seem to hang on for dear life. Photography seems tempting but proves difficult. Too much movement; too much inanimate life in the living things. Birds hide in the bush bottoms and sulk. Overhead even the eagles seem to struggle. I walk on.

Beyond the top of the rock slope is a deep bowl of land. The far side a solid slash of red. This is the sandstone cliff known as Taipan wall – a climber’s Mecca of steep, or slightly overhanging stone. I can hear the call of at least one pair of climbers somewhere up there on the pale face. Metal on metal, metal on stone, short, sharp calls of encouragement and failure. A coloured pathway of gear zigs and zags up the face, following a line I can’t really see. It just looks steep and straight and strenuous from the ground. From the rock it must look even worse – or even better depending on your view. The lead climber sits on his gear and tradition falls away. I watch and wonder at the things people do. I walk on.

At the crest of the bowl is Bird Rock – which is (unsurprisingly) a bird shaped rock. Does it mean anything? Did it ever mean anything? It’s too easy to fall into a mindset that says “I can see that this is a bird”, so it must have had some significance to the older people who walked this land. But is that romance, or is it real and is there any possibility that that they are the same thing? The rock really does look like a bird – but I will leave its significance to people better judged to say.

The path leads to a dead end, which in other places may have been called a box canyon. Today’s path cuts back on itself and leads to the top. A fainter one, hidden in the bushes, leads onto Hollow Mountain and a walk that I need to do again. I go a little way along it for memory’s sake and stop for lunch under a wind driven sky. Flat land stretches out beyond me. Roads are red and straight. I listen for the distant rustle of eagle wings, but this time I am alone. And without shame I know that I am happy to be here. I double back towards the summit, past caves and strangely shaped rocks. The top is marked by a pile of sticks and a metal notice. Both seem out of place. Was there a plan, sometime in the past to light a fire here as a signal? And if so, who was meant to see it and what did it tell? The sign seemed equally strange. It said, in a roundabout sort of way, “you have reached the top – please don’t go any further”. This was helpful advice for those of us who can fly, but the rest of us mortals would probably be content with just the top. Pale butterflies flew around the summit and I could hear a large group approaching the dead end on the path. There were circles cut into the rock and I again wondered if they were manmade. I let the view sink in, and was glad that for a few minutes I was alone at the top.

The trip back, as ever, seemed shorter than the trip there. Check points came faster than expected. The climbers had gone, the weather threatened rain and the wind plucked at my hat. A lizard dashed away under a rock and slowly crept out again. I pointed it out to a passing family – German I think – but they had already seen one, and who needs two lizards when you can have one. Eventually the lizard rushed out of its hiding place and perched on a rock.

The road, dusty, smooth and then dusty again leads back to Halls Gap. I turn a sharp corner and find a car where one should not have been. He may have been a Frenchman coming down my side of the road. He may have been a rally driver, drifting through the corner. He may have been both. I lost sight of his car in the dust. At that point I sighted a large roadside bush, growing larger by the second. Strange as it may seem at this point I began to think that the day was about to become painful or expensive. Possibly both. The bush filled the windscreen and the car stopped. Oh shit. I backed the car out of the bushes and checked it out. It seemed OK. I checked myself out. I seemed OK. There was no skill involved here, it was just flat plain luck. I got back in the car and drove back towards Halls Gap. Slowly.

A few hundred meters (although I still think of the word ‘yards’ here if the truth be told) down the road an echidna wanders across the road. I pull over to watch it. Its gait is unmistakable; the back half waddles and the front half shuffles as it moves. It reaches the roadside bushes with a deal more grace than I recently managed, and, sensing me watching, it buries itself into the ground. I can see it breathing, see the occasional twitch of its long grey blue snout. It settles in to outwait me. It wins. I have seen too much roadside vegetation for today. I continue on my way home. But I can’t help myself, and very soon stop at a flooded field. Australian Shellducks drift through the flooded grass. They have a white neck band, much like their cartoon counterpart, but as far as I know the similarity ends there. Out in the deeper water Australasian Grebes dive for food. Both birds are shadowed by their young. On the far side of the water a mob of kangaroos lie in the late afternoon sun. This may not be the red centre or the while sails of the Opera House, but this really is Australia. A day that could have ended very badly indeed winds down to a halt. I arrive back at the hostel, make tea and toast and think about the day. I’m glad to stop driving.

It’s still windy when I wake the next day. The corellas are still calling and a Sulphur Crested Cockatoo hangs off the wooden frame of the building. Red Browed Finches skip in the gravel. Guests are excited by the kangaroos on the football oval behind the hostel. I make more tea and more toast and go in search of orchids.

Heatherlie Quarry is one of my favourite places. A place where the wheels of industry cut into the bones of the Earth to make the monuments of a new colony. Parliament House and the State Library grew out of the effort put forth in this place. Now it sinks back into the hands of nature. Little stone is cut now, and when it is removed, it is done so with care and discretion. But in the thin soils that formed in the wake of the drill and the blast, orchids flower. Delicate flowers of strange shape and bright colour, formed by the selective dance of flower and pollinator. Formed by the long dance of evolution, step by step. Building on the past. Building on the best of the former generations. In a place that built monuments to people’s confidence in the future this seems only appropriate.

Searching for orchids is like looking for yesterday’s shadows or tomorrow’s sunrise. You always seem to be a day too late, or a day too early. In many places the ground was thick with the flat leaf rosettes of orchids that were yet to flower, but that promised abundance soon. By the path’s edge Wax Lips and Greenhoods nodded in the wind. Fairy Fingers hid in the darkness of the shadows, and Heath glowed in patches of sunlight. Sundews glistened as flies hovered. A small blue butterfly – possibly a Blotched Dusky Blue – drifted past and settled. A few centimetres of metallic colour.

Despite the wind I heard a strange, sharp, rattle from the undergrowth and another echidna walked into view. It pushed its nose through the leaf litter and sticks. I got as close as I could, but, just like before, it buried itself into the soil. This time I was going to wait. Settling onto a block of quarry waste I waited for it to re-emerge. I waited. And then I waited some more. The echidna’s nose slowly floated out of the ground. Through the camera’s eye I can see the nostrils open and shut, open and shut. The nose goes back down into the litter and I wait some more. And some more. Two Grey Fantails, possibly males, call and fight a few feet about my head. A lizard dashes over my feet. And still I wait. The echidna does not move, and neither do I. But in the end it wins. Pins and needles tickle my leg and I lose contact with my bum. I get up and leave and walk the ten meters back to the path. When I turn round to look for the echidna it’s gone. Two nil to the monotremes.

The downhill path takes me back to the car and the journey home. The orchids will flower tomorrow, the echidnas will still be there tomorrow as well. And luckily, I’ll be here as well.

On Fishing

2011-09-19T21:36:00.008+10:00

I was reading last month that otters have been recently seen in every county in England. This is a good thing. In the same article I saw otters described as “wanton killers” – this is clearly not a good thing. This brutal assessment of the otter was penned by a fisherman. By a fisherman whose articles and books I had read as a kid. By a fisherman whose words, thoughts and tips I had tried – largely without success – to apply to my own fishing. I never got a good view of an English otter, just a single dark swirl under a bridge on a cold winter’s morning. I had to wait for an Irish otter with a sea caught eel, to watch one. It was all over in minutes, quite possibly seconds, but it has lasted a life time. When I was a kid and I spent hour upon hour at the water’s edge, otters were a spectre, an ecological ghost from another, greener if not gentler, time. They really did seem to exist on the edge of reality and getting a good view of one would have made any fish I caught seem trifling and irrelevant. So, how does it come that one angler with a national profile, and another who is not even considered that competent by his own family (I blame H for this!) can seem to view things so differently?

I’ve fished most of my life – except for the middle years when I heard the call of rock and snow and tried – again largely without success – to move into the mountains. I climbed many hills and rock faces, but at times I knew that I missed the simple peace and quiet of the river bank. Knew that I missed the simple thrill of a plan that comes together. Climbing led me to some wonderful places, but I often wanted to stop and watch the ravens rather than push on up the next pitch. Despite being in places of often shocking exposure and isolation, I never felt the same peace that can sometimes be found at the water’s edge at the turning of the day. When I was in the hills the last thing I wanted was to become lost; when I was by the water it happened without thinking.

A kind of silent intense concentration that some people mistake for inactivity can form around me where nothing escapes my notice. The movement of the leaves points to birds, fish dimple the surface of the water and the rod becomes a real extension of your arm. It’s not common, but at such times almost nothing can go wrong. And almost nothing goes unnoticed. It’s at that time that you see so much more than just fish, the water rhythmic nod of the rod tip or the slow, predictable, movement of a float in the water.

These days I am more likely to be standing on the edge of the ocean rather than next to small pools or gently talkative rivers. On even the calmest day there is always movement, both in the water and in the sky. Waves wash and sweep over your feet, gulls and terns, or best of all, gannets, wash and sweep over your head.

It was late afternoon, maybe even early evening, when I arrived on the beach. Other people were leaving as I arrived - two girls and three boys. It seemed a recipe for disaster. Their footmarks stretched back towards where I was going. They overlapped and changed – the sand marks of shifting position as they jostled to stand next to their favourite. Such things feel anciently distant for me and frighteningly close for my own kids. I walk at the very water’s edge, my passing covered by the movement of the waves. Back along the arch of the beach no one is in sight. I feel the noisy silence of an empty beach surround me.

The waves break on the beach with adolescent haste and run back to the sea with a gentle, parental rebuke - crasshhhh , schhhhhh, crasshhhh , schhhhhh, over and over again. Beyond the waves the sea looks flat and calm, there are no birds, there is little movement. I sit down to watch. For a while I leave the gear undisturbed in the bag, and the fish undisturbed in the sea. A nearly full moon sits behind a light summer blanket of clouds, a patch of lightness in an otherwise dull sky. But a wind is pushing the clouds over the moon and you can see the light fade and grow and the clouds thicken and thin.

I begin the fish, but somehow I’m not surprised when nothing happens. The waves roll in. The tide moves up the beach and the curlews call. But the sea could be empty, the fish could be elsewhere. On the horizon a light appears, it becomes two and as it moves away it becomes one again. I catch no fish, but I catch sight of the curve of the Earth. The world turns, the waves wash and the sky clears a little. Now there is a patchwork of clouds. When the moon comes out from behind a cloud it’s as if a light has been switched on, as it’s covered, the light fades. Finally, an hour or so later the sky is clear, and a cooler wind blows. It’s later at night but lighter now – this seems a contradiction. I have long since stopped fishing – I’m just stood by the water with fishing tackle.

The change in the sky makes me think of the last few years – with a change from cloud to open sky, from a covering darkness to a form of seeing. A form of seeing that has come much, much later in the day than it should have. This is a strange set of thoughts, generated by the same activity that drove another fisherman to label otters “wanton killers”. What’s going on here? Can it really be possible that we are talking about the same thing? I don’t think so. To want to fish and not want to see otters seems an impossible combination.

I pack up and walk back along the beach in silver shimmer moonlight. I have no fish. But on a night like this I realise, that once more, I don’t really mind at all.

The Kingfisher Theory - Part 3

2011-08-29T21:55:00.044+10:00

It was my turn to get the paper. As I drove I tried to ignore the bird on the telephone wire. I tried to believe that it was a mistake – but it wasn’t. I tried to believe that I had slept in and that it was the afternoon – but I hadn’t. It was a kingfisher, it was the morning and The Theory was in ruins. I could not even take sanctuary in the old adage that “it’s exceptions that prove the rule” – because they don’t. It’s basic science that exceptions disprove rules. Exceptions no more prove rules than internal belief makes things true in the outside world. The kingfisher was not there on the way back, and neither was The Theory. It was back on the drawing board, and a theory that says “kingfishers only sit on the telephone wires in the afternoons (except on Thursdays)” does not really have the feeling of elegant symmetry that good theories often have. I was so distressed that I had an extra piece of toast when I got home. And another cup of tea.

We drove past the wires again on the way to find our boat. I could hardly bring myself to look, but I did. There were Fig Birds, there were White Fronted Woodswallows, and Bee-eaters, but no kingfishers. I tried to forget about The Kingfisher Theory for a while, but even though it had only been dead an hour or so I really missed it.

We were greeted at the dock by a Rock Wallaby and a Brahminy Kite. They were both studiously ignoring us and each other. Our boat was still on land, although Cliff the owner, and our guide for the day, was just about to manoeuvre it into the water. The boat looked like a WWII landing craft, complete with drop front and vertical sides, although it lacked a machine gun, and it was most certainly not camo green or battleship grey. If you are not able to visualise the kind of vessel I am describing, think of a shoe box with the front, narrow section able to be moved up and down at will. That’s about it. It had a shallow draft that could float over coral reefs that would have been shredding other boats and was able to land us on beaches that other boats could not get into. Its boxy construction gave it a ride that was more percussive than comfortable, but what it lacked in grace it made up for in practicality. It had the sweeping lines and elegance of a house brick, but Cliff, who had built the boat in his back yard, clearly loved his boat. In the end we felt that way too.

Within minutes of leaving the harbour H had taken control of the helm. He would remain more or less glued into this position for the majority of the trip. This did cause a degree of consternation as all his previous driving experience had been gained on the computer and had almost inevitably ended in fiery disaster. Not today though. Our vessel plugged through the water with surprising speed. The coast slid past and birds of prey – osprey, kite and eagle – drifted overhead. As we round one bay we find a large egg shaped rock perched on a headland. There is a little window to the other side of the bay at its base. Sprawled across the top of the stone is a White Bellied Sea Eagle’s nest. A nest on an egg, rather than an egg in a nest. But we don’t see any eagles here. Later in the week we find another nest in the same bay – so maybe this nest has been abandoned, with the birds moving into a more desirable treetop house. On the boat the depth finder pings happily, but starts to squawk in distress as we approach a coral reef.

Like the ones near the shore, these reefs do not give the crystal clear BBC Wildlife Unit views. The rippled water and reef combined to give a feel of what was under there, rather than a full view. It was like looking at a naturally occurring impressionist painting. No blocky colours or straight lines, but hints of depth and contour. Splashes of colour that you knew were near the surface without ever really knowing how you could tell. The depth sounder was near to psychiatric breakdown. We got into our wet suits, which is a process so lacking in any elegance that I refuse to describe it. Just let it be said that was a process that was richer in humour than it was in grace.
The kids soon got cold, but we stayed in the water longer, watching. Sharp edges and rounded, fluted pillars. Fish, coloured darts of energy and sheen, flash past and hide under ledges, dive into tiny caves or disappear into the distance. Around towers of coral – bommies – the fish gathered in greater numbers. They were bigger too. I chose to ignore the magnifying effects of the face mask and enjoyed the scale of the fish, close by or suddenly distant. Waves broke over the pillars and bounced us around – living flotsam, wave washed and, for a few seconds, at the mercy of the sea’s own rhythm. But the wet suits are buoyant and we were in no danger, however it was strange to feel yourself being picked up and put down. It was rather splendid really – and I should remember that when my kids ask me to lift them up, to spin them like tops. It’s a brief second when you break free of the pull of gravity and fly, a brief second when the constraints of the normal give way to the reality of dreams. Swimming in places like this really does feel like flying. We are spun back on to the boat, with a kick of the feet and a twist of the arms. Water drip drops from our noses and ears. We smile and ignore the faint chill of the wind. The kids laugh at their parent seals and the boat moves on.

The ocean is large and our boat so small. Even with the shore in view you could feel the space around you. Something happens to scale and distance on the sea – the near recedes and far can rush up with unexpected haste. All sights are good fortune, encountered on a vague path that may never be taken again. You cannot place things, judging distance is hard and a shape on the water may just be the wind and waves, or it may be, sometimes, something else.

A green dust-bin lid turns into a turtle swimming past. It’s going one way and we’re going the other. The vectors combine to make it pass by in the twinkle of an eye. It’s just a fleeting glimpse really, but it’s a highlight. This was not the torchlight procession to a breeding beach, but a chance collision between the watched and the transient. Such encounters have the feel of a found object. An item of chance that could have easily been missed and passed over.

At first glance the beach seems empty expect for a line of old footprints that were slowly being washed away. The boat was anchored both ways, one against the pull of the tide, the other against the push of the wind. We walk the tide line in search of shells and recent treasure. P finds shell after shell, sea bright and damp. H finds stones and rocks with familiar shapes that only he sees.

On the edge of the beach, where the sand meets the trees, Bush Stone Curlews run and hide – confident in the camouflage they carry. Sitting on reverse bent knees, relying on their cryptic nature they stare with wide eyes. One of the birds seems much redder than the other, but they allow me to get close before they rush off and hide again. Behind the beach the trees hold a flock of Red-Tailed Black Cockatoos. Huge birds with crests that rise and flatten with the bird’s mood. They sit and watch – sometimes reaching out for a seed pod which they shred with practiced ease. Standing still and listening for the falling of broken pods is the best way to find new birds. Eventually they seemed to have had enough of me and my cameras and as one they lifted off and flew inland. How did they do that? What was communicated?

We pull up the shore-side anchor and pull the boat out to sea on the other line. It feels like the boat is stationary and the land is moving. Waves slap on the flat sides and bottom of the boat. The water deepens. In the distance a shape moves in the water – and we all look in the same direction. The shape reappears, dark and sleek. I think I know what it is, but it should not be here yet. Then a large fluke tail fans up from the surface and we are left in no doubt. It’s a whale. Then it becomes two whales – which we take to be a mother and calf. They disappear for a few seconds that feel like disappointing minutes, then they surface much closer to us. Then closer still. This does not seem like a collision between an interested observer and a disinterested other – it feels like we are both checking each other out. The whales move between the shore and us and then vanish again. When they break back to the surface they are only 10’s of meters away. They swim towards us. Eventually I can no longer focus on the whale with my longer lens. How can it be possible to need a wide angle lens to photograph whales! Then in a perfect recreation of the “we’re going to need a bigger boat” scene from Jaws, both of the whales swim under the boat. The mother’s fluke heaps water up at the surface as she dives, the calf close by her side. The whales move away from us, up the coast, and we stand almost speechless – my kids aren’t speechless, they never are; but at least, for a short time, they seem a little quieter than normal. I’m reluctant to leave, but there’s no reason to stay. The whales have moved on, going up the coast to wherever they were going before they came over to check us out.

The coast line changes in a flash as we move from one geology to another – a vertical cut in the shore marking the place where we move from one age to another. How long has it taken for this change to make its way to the surface and show in the land? I can’t help but think about the size of the sea and the age of the Earth. Both huge beyond real comprehension, but understandable nonetheless. Numbers on this scale seem so unobtainable, and push us towards thinking that measures the world only in human scale. This seems to be a mistake. I wonder if the whales consider their migration trips to be long (assuming that they even have an idea of “long”) and I come to think that they would not. It would be normal. Just because we tend to peak out at heights around 2m does not make things beyond that big – they are just not two metres. Encounters with animals of such scale, in a place of such size, can make you think like this.
But the day was not over yet. On the long run back to dock – H firmly back at the the helm after P had led us a merry, fluid dance – there was another shape in the water. A brief shape, with a huge head and no dorsal fin. There was a brief glimpse of tail and it was gone – I think it was a dugong! I can’t be sure, but I don’t really care. We are not looking at “beyond all reasonable doubt” here. I think I know what it was, and on a day like this one it seems more likely than not that it was.

We pull into the road that will lead to our house. There are kingfishers on the wires and I remember The Theory. And I remember that it no longer works. They are gathering on a leafless tree and bathing in a bath! The bath is probably a horse trough now, but it really was a bath, complete with taps. The light has faded, and the photographs don’t flow. In the end I give up and just watch. Blue flashes from branch to water. Feather flicking and preening on the fence. The Kingfisher Theory is dead, but the kingfishers are alive and well, and at the end of a day full of surprises I realise that I don’t really mind at all.

The Kingfisher Theory - Part 2

2011-08-10T21:59:00.037+10:00

In my mind the phrase “coral reef” will be forever linked to a Frenchman, seemingly made from leather, pushing the Zodiacs away from The Calypso. Small knitted woollen hats. An undersea world that was very, very far away, full of lithe divers, which, it now seems to me now, must have had been both exotic and faintly erotic. Even in the dull tones of black and white TV, you could tell that the living reefs were alive with colour. Yet the only coral I knew was cold and grey, turned to lifeless stone at the same times as the world swamps laid down and turn to coal. Sleeping the long sleep of a carbon sink. Waiting. The coral, weathered from cliff faces on the Mendips, found its way into my pockets and was eventually lost during teenage room cleanings – times when you throw away childhood treasure despite adulthood looking distant and difficult.

When I read that there was coral reef that you could walk out to at the end of Horseshoe Bay I have to say that my interest levels went up a notch or three. So at low tide I set off to find the reef, wondering if there would be any lithe Frenchmen there, or nut-brown marine biologists. When I got there it looked nothing like what I expected. It was largely grey brown, as if I was still seeing it on a black and white television, or a poorly tuned colour one. It seemed, well, dusty and uncleaned. It looked like it could do with a good spring clean. I was not really disappointed, but I was surprised. I slowed down to look and realised I had been tricked by the scale of things. There was abundant life, but much of it was small, hidden. Tiny specks of fish darted in the pools and crabs rushed to find shelter. Shrimps, transparent as living glass, worked their way from sand patch to sand patch, legs flashing in all directions. A blur of activity around an invisible core. A larger crab, hand sized, raised its claws in threat, or anger, or both. Dome shaped corals, with a surface that glistened like honeycomb pushed above the surface.

Herons and Egrets stalked through the shallow water, necks held as springs and eyes focussed on the flashes and movement of the water. If I came too close they eyed me with obvious wintry discontent, head held high, neck straightened. One step more from me and they took flight with two or three lazy flaps and glided to another part of the reef. The egrets took flight quicker, but landed sooner. Easier to spook, quicker to recover. I watched them catch tiny sparklings of fish which were swallowed, flip flap, with barely a pause. The slightly larger ones were first turned around head first to better slide down the curved, slender neck, then swallowed in a fluid gulp. As I would come to learn they were far better at fishing than I was. The more I looked the more I saw. The colours were not great, but the place was. Bursting.

I notice a circle, a hole in the ground, with coral scraps built up around it. A fish? A crab? Who knows, but it was not there by chance and it was not designed either. Complexity and order without design. Purpose, yes. But how that purpose is defined depends on what you select, on what you see being passed on. Small movements in the watery hole made me stop and wait. And wait. And whatever it was, waited as well, and outlasted me. I don’t suppose you live long if you are small, probably tasty and imprudent with your appearances. I moved on and left the hole and its dweller to its own devices. The exposed coral sand and mud hissed and pooped with the busy sounds of life. From hidden places the rocks themselves seem to spit in disgust at my human intrusion. But it’s just the sea-squirts those ancient, stiffened ancestors, squeezing short spurts of water into the air. I feel that it’s no way to great family, no matter how distant.

Coral as a sort of living rock messes with our ideas of what it means to be alive. And when I found something that looked for all the world like a pile of melted industrial rubber gloves I knew that I was looking at something strange and distant. The coral (if that’s what it was) lay slumped in one small part of the reef. It looked alien. It was slightly soft to the touch, yielding in a way that was strangely unpleasant.

On the muddy sand behind the reef soldier crabs marched in ever changing formations. Splitting and reforming, pausing for no reason I could detect and then moving on. Like all good soldiers they dug when danger approached. In their Blues, their dress uniforms, down by the sea, could they be anything but Marines? They seemed to bypass a star fish lying upside down on the sand, the slight movement of its legs a signal that it would soon cease to twinkle. The water that flows over the sand is bath warm, and I stand ankle deep at the wave’s edge and know that, for this week at least, I have driven the cold winter away.

On the way back to the house for lunch there were no kingfishers on the wires. The Kingfisher Theory holds. On the way out in the afternoon they were there. The Theory holds again.
We parked by the road and walked uphill. It was bright but cool – perfect. Queenslanders walked past in jackets and hats. Tourists walked past in shorts and tee shirts. Most people seemed to be wearing sandals, as if snakes were non- existent and advice was meant for other people. With a well defined sense of superiority I tripped over and almost dropped my camera. H laughed. I wondered if my sandals were in the car.

We were looking for one of Australia’s icons, the Koala. We need to get a few things straight here – it’s not a bear, they don’t spend most of their time in drug induced comas caused by toxins in gum leaves and they don’t fall out of trees onto tourists as in a form of passive aggressive defence. In fact they are related to wombats, sleep whilst they are fermenting their food and only fall out of the trees if they are sick, too hot or dead. The other truth we need to deal with is that once you have found your koala they are not the most interesting thing in the world to watch. They have taken energy conservation to world record levels. Their brains have shrunk so that they no longer fill their heads. They don’t move that much at all. Basically all they do on a regular basis is eat and sleep. The males do a bit of growly shouting in the proper season, to which the females may or may not respond. It depends if they are asleep of not. Koalas also spend a short time each day developing ideas for reality TV, a task for which their shrunken brains are ideally suited, but this is not widely known. Watching a koala is a bit like watching a grey, furry, largely immobile, wooden canker. And while you are watching them you can’t help but smile.

Allegedly there is a thriving colony of Koalas on Magnetic Island. We found just the one. That’s Koala, not colony! It was sat in plain view in a brightly light tree doing almost nothing at all. It seemed to have a game eye, but it could just have been saving energy by keeping it shut. It did actually move its head as we were watching it, but that’s about it.

We walked on and came to an explosives bunker. The hill we were climbing was used during WW II as a look out and gun emplacement. It guarded the approaches to Townsville and never fired a shot in anger. Well not at the enemy anyway. Apparently the guns at the top of the hill had a design that gave them “deadly accuracy”. But when they fired on a small US navy ship that appeared without warning one day they missed! This was probably a good thing for all concerned, especially the ship being subjected to the deadly accurate fire.

Huddled on the roof of the bunker were three Bent Wing Bats. This information was provided on the same sort of signage as described the guns as “deadly accurate” – so they could be anything really, although I am convinced that they were bats! I found them by using the focus assist light on my camera as the world’s most expensive low power torch. In the brief glimpses I got of them, they seemed to be asleep. I found a spider in the same way, and that did not move either. Had I entered some Rumplestiltskin land where all the wildlife was asleep? It seemed that way.
I emerged from the bunker to some of the first living movement that was not part of my own family. A large blue speckled butterfly flew past and landed on a leaf – and stayed there. It was a Blue Tiger. And then it stayed there some more. I had caught it moving, and now it sat very still for a very long time. I’ve never seen such immobile wildlife before.

The top of the hill was covered in the kind of rabbit warren, functional concrete that kids enjoy exploring. Of course it was designed to allow boys only slightly older than H to rain death on equally young boys somewhere near the horizon. I did not feel obliged to point this out at the time. We were joined for lunch by a Pied Currawong.

The view from the hill top was remarkable – with small sandy beaches, forests and other islands in all directions. I was reminded of Turkey, where stories of unending horror were told in a landscape of bright, floral beauty. This place was not the same, but what would it have been like to sit surrounded by all this, waiting to kill, or waiting to face death? In such places this duality is so near the surface that it cannot be ignored. Life and death side by side. The beauty of the world and its other beastly reality hunched together on a small island.

As we drove home there were kingfishers on the wires. I had this place under control.

The Kingfisher Theory

2011-07-27T22:22:00.024+10:00

It was cold, damp and impolitely early when Mick the Taxi said “It’s all good”. My kids had never been up so early unless they were ill. If the truth be told I had not been up this early for a long time either, unless of course the kids were ill.

The journey to the airport was as uneventful as you could have wished for. Melbourne was generally asleep, or only half awake. The world seemed to move in a collective feather warmth, and few of the buildings we passed had lights at the windows. The roads were quiet. The kids were quiet. But you could sense the excitement. When we arrived at the airport all hell broke loose.

There were too many people, there were not enough staff. Instructions were contradictory at best and absent at worst. People were improvising, and people were getting it wrong. The kids were still excited, the staff were flustered. I was both. Simultaneously. The sparrows that had amused me as I stood in line for previous flights were nowhere to be seen. When I found them, they were being forced back against the rafters of the roof by the sheer volume of stress being generated in the queues below. Occasionally you could see them shake their heads, and comment on how poorly evolved people were – “how difficult is it to fly?” Eventually, after being told we had done the wrong thing and then being congratulated for being the best organised family in the queue we checked in and handed over our bags. I think if you could bottle the feeling that getting rid of your bags generates you would be able to sell it hand over fist.

Drinking small bitter coffees we sat and watched the planes come and go. How long will this last? This ability to up sticks and travel? My kids have a combined age that only just breaks double figures but they were about to go on a journey longer than any my mother ever undertook. My father only travelled like this because of the invasion of Poland and the needs of the British navy. We take this for granted and forget that most people have never done this and never will. We seem to live in a bright window of time where all things are still possible, and the consequences of this freedom have only just begun. The next few years will, to say the least, be interesting. And now we will fly for 3 hours. Heading north to Queensland, which would be a whole country, or maybe two, in Europe. To Townsville and then to Magnetic Island. The flight passes with food and books, drinks and iPods, small heartfelt disputes about window seats and who gets to sit with mum. Time slows. Kilometres slide by. The horizon flares bright red, then silver and finally day sky blue.

Townsville is surprisingly cool and sharp without the wet blanket humidity of my last visit. We put on shorts. The locals say it’s cold. We beg to differ, but they only laugh and pull the up the collars on their coats. If it was not for the currency in my wallet you’d have to think you were in a different country. When we get on the ferry I start to think that we may be. There is a “polite notice” that says that alcohol will not be served before 10am. Given that it’s almost mid-day the bar is open and mixed drinks are in evidence. This I should point out is on a ferry which is to all intents and purposes a public transport vehicle! Most people are wearing a jacket and shorts. Almost everybody is wearing thongs – that’s the flip-flop footwear type. These shoes (and I use the term loosely) are cheap, nearly ubiquitous and utterly without a single redeeming feature.
A Brahminy Kite soars around the ferry terminal. Two or three silver gulls drift on the water and fight over food scraps. As the kite turns the sun turns its chestnut body a deep shade of red. It lands on a roof top and settles with a wing flap and a burst of preening. I watch the water. I look for terns. The eight kilometre gulf between land and island shrinks and the Island grows on the horizon. Some people just called it Maggie Island – but I can’t come at that. Too many political overtones, too many shrill speeches, that handbag. We arrive at what I discover is the least attractive part of the island. The foreshore is dominated by an apartment building which is a classic of the “softened Stalinist school” of architecture. It was clearly designed by somebody with a fear of curves and a love for anonymous concrete. It’s with a sense of relief that we pile into the car and head for the other side of the island.

Up over the hill we go and then down the other side. P declares that this place is “just like a twopical island” – and we almost crash with laughter. Another Brahminy Kite drifts into view. We find our house, which is all curves and open space. We unload the car. Lizards dash over the wooden deck and green ants commute along the handrails. Helmeted Friarbirds talk in the tree tops, their calls including a “chack” which sounds like Jackdaw. I look up, confused. The nearest Jackdaw is probably half a world away. Chequered butterflies, that look black and white in the patchwork tree light, scatter from the undergrowth. A kookaburra laughs from a nearby tree and a flock of Sulphur Crested Cockatoos dash overhead calling wildly and flying with tumbling style. Doors are opened, windows slid back, the house is explored. We make some tea, we try the chairs, we settle in.

The beach is a short drive away. Telephone wires hang limp between grey poles, and strung out along them are birds. Fig Birds with bright red eyes, Rainbow Bee-Eaters sweet with blue-green feathers and White-Breasted Wood Swallows, dapper in black and white. And there are also Kingfishers. Bright as blue buttons. None of these birds were there as we drove to the house, and now they are abundant. My mind starts to whir.
We arrive at the beach and park under pale blue skies and palm trees. It’s late afternoon and the light is already different, less intense, slightly warm and glowing. The beach really is a sweep of gold, coarse grained and clean. It’s fringed with palm trees. Far out to sea I see a bird with wide upswept wings; it grows larger as it approaches and it’s clear it’s a White-Bellied Sea-Eagle. It moves over the sea with little apparent effort. Then out of the corner of my eye I see another bird flying directly at the eagle. The birds are on a collision course and the sea-eagle banks and gains height to avoid the incoming bird. It’s an Osprey, closely followed by a second. The attack seems to have worked because the sea-eagle reduces in size as it heads back out to sea. The Ospreys fly back towards the beach, but veer off sharply to harass a Brahminy Kite! This all happens with two minutes of getting out of the car. We walk along the sand, looking for shells and sea dollars. But something is missing. There are almost no gulls. This will last all week. Within an hour I have seen more birds of prey than gulls – what’s going on?

The afternoon light quickly fades, and the horizon glows in a subtle sunset. No clouds. No fireworks. We return home in growing darkness. The early morning has taken its toll and we are in need of sleep. A Pheasant-Coucal, a strange and spiky looking bird walks by the side of the road, I U-turn to see it, but it’s gone. My family protest. They want their beds. Rock-Wallabies rush from the headlights and hide under the house. It really is bed time for the kids. Darkness has come quickly and the condensation runs down the outside of a beer bottle. Circles form on the table top. The night sounds begin. Bush Stone-Curlews scream into the darkness, the calls of local birds are picked up by more distant ones and soon the night is full of their strange song. The wallabies crash through the undergrowth. There is a metallic donk as one seems to collide with the metal poles beneath the house. It wanders off muttering to itself – it’s my first experience of marsupial swearing. To round out the day a bat joins us in the bedroom. After a few laps of the fan it lands on a metal beam and side shuffles into an invisible hole. We never see it again. Despite the primacy of the eye it becomes the ear that lets me know I am not at home.

The soundscape is a mixture of the known and the foreign. And some sounds are the familiar made strange. Familiar Cockatoos call in the distance, and now and then you can hear the song of the sea. Bush Stone-Curlews continue to call, weird and certainly unfamiliar. A Blue-Winged Kookaburra twists laughter into a maniac’s cackle, a broken humour that in humans would be sign of madness or a deep unreachable loneliness. In the end the Stone-Curlews outlast all the others and to their strange and foreign chorus we fall asleep.
By the next morning the sounds have sunk in, leached overnight into my brain, shifted from the frontground to the background. We wake slowly. Soft sunshine. Tree sounds. Small sounds.

There are no kingfishers on the wires. But there are Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos in the paddocks. They feed on the spilt and split grain meant for horses. They don’t seem very brave, flying well before I expected, but they are hungry and soon they return. The urge to feed overcoming the urge to flee. Tiny blue pigeons – Peaceful Doves – walk out of the long grass. Yellow-Bellied Sunbirds flash through the hedgelines, the male with a splendid blue bib, the female two-tone yellow and softened green. On days like this the trip to fetch the paper feels like a chance rather than a chore. When I return there are still no kingfishers. I wonder why. Maybe they are only there in the afternoon – it’s a theory at least. A Kingfisher theory. A theory in need of testing.

Dusk till Dusk - 24 hours in my garden.

2011-07-06T20:04:00.025+10:00

This is another experiment - very few words this time. All the pictures shown here were taken between about 4.45 pm on Friday 1st July and 4.45pm the next day. I just wondered what I would see.

The house bricks flare in the setting sun.
The trees shine with the light of green and of gold.

Shadows grow, shadows dance, the sea of night cuts through.

Flowers still bloom, some hidden, some clear, but this is mid-winter?

The bark of trees, leaves fallen and brown, a winter reminder of the summer to come .

By the door, a black spider, a faint flash of red, gathered around it the remains of its last meal.

A long legged fly on the fence, another sits in the sun.

A wood pile knot, the eye of a tree, seems to look out on the passing day. But it can’t really see.

The hours tick over, a day comes and goes.

Moon Shine.

2011-07-02T17:44:00.025+10:00

As a kid I could always tell when it had snowed. Not because it was cold - in the winter it was always cold in my bedroom - but because of the quality of the silence. It was a silver silence, gilt edged and firm. Not the kind of silence that follows an argument, or a misplaced word. Not the kind of silence you wished you could fill with the everyday or the common place. Not the feather soft silence of a quietened room, a church, a concert hall, where the urge to shuffle your feet, click your fingers or clear your throat grows by the minute. It was the kind of silence that would bury you and make noise or hearing pointless. The creaks and clicks of a waking house sounded like an intrusion. It was not the kind of silence you heard every day. It was the kind of silence that is important to hear.

I doubt I will ever wake to snow and silence in Melbourne. But I do wake, now and then, into a new kind of light, a silver shadow light, gilt edged and firm. Moonlight washes through the house, gathers in pale pools below windows and doors. Not the sharp beams of an inquisitorial sun, or the sugar soft mood light of designer lamps, placed with infinite care in corners and under arches. In as far as modern houses are designed at all, they are not designed with moonlight in mind. Finding moonlight in your house, in ephemeral pools of silver, slight with the movement of the sky, seems like a gift. A coincidence not to be rejected, a silver stallion of such startling beauty and rarity that to inspect its teeth would be an insult.

The clouds slide across the face of the moon as it plays peek a boo, hide and seek with the faces on the ground. On a cloudy night, with a breeze pushing gently at your hair, you feel as though the sky is still and you are moving through it. Silently whirling through space with only the come and go light of the moon for company. On darker nights the clouds boil around the moon, layer upon layer. A faint patch in a darkened sky.

On some nights bats give in to cliché and fly across the face of the moon, and gather in noisy troops in fruit trees. By day they hang in the tree tops, with noisy frequent squabbles and much wrapping and unwrapping of wings. During the day you hear and smell the bats before you see them. At night, twitching branches, areas of greater darkness against the dull dark sky, lead you to them. They crash and rattle though the trees, clumsy, but still a night creature.

Sometimes the beating night wings are those of birds. A long time ago, in a different kind of place, the wings would have belonged to owls. Brown Tawny Owls sitting on fence posts, listening as much as looking or bright white Barn Owls floating over the road, coming in and going, flying the contours of the land, ghosting up onto their prey. Stealth hunting. Here the wings belong to Tawny Frogmouths, a kind of nightjar that is often mistaken for an owl. They are masters of cryptic disguise, but this ruse fails if they sit on ‘phone wires, waiting for the moths that are drawn to the street light’s glow. Here each thing feels the pull of the light that brightens the night. Moth to the street light candle flame, bird to the moth, me to the bird.

Night and day, life and death, the compass points of a life. Each night we give ourselves over to the little death of sleep. Night allows us to give the day away and know that the next one will come. Did the bringing of light begin the fear of death? With light we could prolong the day, keep the night away and with it postpone, briefly, a little death. And eventually did thoughts like this arise: “if we can find enough light, if we can push back the darkness, we can live forever?” How many religions equate their imagined friends and the promise of forever with light? Did the Sun God become the Son of Heaven? Has making light created demons rather than pushed back the shadows? Has light caused us to fear the very thing we know we cannot avoid? To know you can come through darkness is not to know you will live forever, but to know that death is natural, and final. Did the first man or woman who looked out into the shadow cast by the first fire know that they preferred the light to the dark? Did they crave more and more light? Did they think that the light could drive away the dark forever? And in that did they cast the seed of fear and doubt into our minds? Was that the moment when we started a war on darkness that continues to this day?

I’m not sure that people fear the night, but they do seem to fear the dark. Imagine the time and energy that has been spent on needlessly pushing back the darkness. Streetlights burn through the long hours of the night only illuminating themselves. The Earth viewed from space is a speckled mass of light, each point of light a soldier in the war against darkness, and most of them fuelled in way that seems to be burning tomorrow as much as protecting today.

My walk to work began in the kind of clear light that is only made possible by rain. I spend the day at my desk, altering the patterns of magnetism on a spinning disc and speaking to people in Japan. A day of pushing electrons into new places. The walk home should have been in near darkness, but of course it was not. Light leaks from shop windows and doors, from twisting garden path lights and street lamps, from passing cars, from automated lamps that welcome the unexpected by beating back the darkness. The faces of some people glow from the light of their phones as they talk and walk and talk walk. I walked along streets that had been robbed of their darkness, and instead were robed in a pale, yellow wash of light.

The sky was never really dark on the way home, there was too much light, and too much colour. It stayed blue, but became a darker and darker shade, so in the end the whole sky seemed covered in shadow. The moon was just a thin bright slither, with a dull disc held in the arcs – the old moon holding the new moon in its arms. The face of the moon lit with dull Earth glow and the Earth bright with the shine of our invention.

For almost half a year I lived on the west coast of Ireland, on an island just across the sea from Baltimore. I earned almost no money, so many nights were spent nursing endless cups of tea and looking out over the Atlantic. And between me and my cooling tea and the eastern seaboard of the United States there was almost nothing at all. Just wave after wave of empty sea. On new moon nights it was the darkest place I’d ever been, but because of this I could see more lights than I ever imagined existed. Bright stars, dull stars. Stars without end. The slow track of satellites. The faster, blinking lights of planes. Sometimes the sea itself would glow with the light of uncountable life. Enough stars to count a million million restless children to sleep. But mostly it was dark. This was the first time I’d seen the sky as the ancient stone carvers and architects had seen it. They saw signs and portents in the movement of the lights in the sky, and even today I doubt it’s possible to look at such a sky and not have at least one question come to mind; “Hello, is there anybody out there?” Both religion and SETI are based on the same question; “Are we really alone?”

In the darkness people looked up to the moon and saw a face – I struggle to do this. Some people saw a hare, and the moon goddess they created came to Earth in that form. In countries and cultures separated by sweeps of both time and distance the moon and the hare are linked. Madness and fertility linking the moon and the quick silver dash of an animal that we barely know. We can laugh at such beliefs, but we bring the Moon Hare goddess into our houses each Easter, morphed into a rabbit, formed from chocolate, as we pretend to celebrate something other than the coming of spring and the ending of winter. Easter day itself is regulated by the phase of the moon and a arcane calculation that goes back centuries.
For all that the night has been illuminated by our design, I think it does no harm to walk in the moonshine of a clear evening and consider the things we have done, or the things we have yet to see.

A Stranger in a Strange Land.

2011-06-19T20:00:00.036+10:00

There’s a Blackbird on the lawn, a Common Mynah on the roof line. There’s a Magpie on the back fence, but it’s not a crow, it’s a type of butcher bird. Parrots flash overhead, seeking winter gum flowers. House Sparrows flick from under the eaves to feed on silver birch seeds. A late to bed possum hurries, fleet footed, along a wire. My birthday moves from spring to autumn during the course of a single plane flight. It snows in June. For year after year it barely rains, then in capricious novelty it floods. At Christmas I worry that it will be too hot to sit in the garden. The forest trees keep their leaves all year, and on a hot summer’s day the woods smell of childhood colds, night-time vapours, last night’s pyjamas.

A few sky bright shards of childhood memory linger. Skippy. Rolf Harris. People with skin so black that the light seemed to sink into them. Australia seemed so far away that it may as well have been the moon. Manchester was a long way away, Melbourne impossibly so. I only knew one family that had been overseas. The world was small, green, damp and English.

Fast forward to today and my own garden is a mixture of the then and the now. A strange combination of the visitor and the migrant, the welcome and the regretted, the native and home grown. The sparrows search in trees that shade our poorly placed western windows and, until it succumbed to disease, a gum tree grew by the back fence. I doubt that it was planted, it was a wild seed that found a place in its native soil and was allowed to stay. It found a kind of homecoming. It made me jealous.

Migration is not really a point of difference in Australia, it’s the common theme for most families. There have been people here for over 50,000 years, but in this part of Australia you would be hard pressed to know this. That history lies hidden, buried under other, more recent layers. When it comes to the surface it comes as a surprise. On the beach below the house in Tasmania the sand dunes were littered with oyster shells. Fragile things. Broken things. Ancient things. The shells are part of a huge midden, the discards from the fast food bay that has been harvested for years and years. I don’t know the age of these shells but it’s more than possible that they were thrown away before Rome or Athens ever were. They were left on the beach by a culture that is old beyond the reckoning of words. And when the story that this layer of land tells comes to the surface you find out that you know something different. There is a shift in what you know and a rattle as other pieces of the known world shuffle into their newly found place. A kind of history that mocks the lack of stone circles and hill top forts, but survives in stories and art and song.

In Campbell Town there are house bricks on the sides of the pavements with crimes and sentences stamped into them. The crimes and punishments of convicts shipped half way across the world to solve a problem not of their making. Stealing a pig: Seven Years. Selling Stolen Butter: Six Years. Attempted murder: Life. Stealing Gloves: Six Years – Two Weeks addition for breaking a glass. This is a record of the beginning of the Australia I see every day. The convict colony that became the modern nation. The words on the pavement, when read aloud, sound like some form of brutal machine poetry, propelled forward with an insane rhythm and logic all of its own. A kind of Beat poetry where the beatings were for real.
The shells and the stones both tell a story. The birds under the eaves and the trees in the gardens tell another. Layer upon layer. An onion skin reality, where each new layer does not bring you to the middle, but exposes another surface in need of exploration. Some layers come as a shock because they are new, while others surprise, because rather than difference, they reveal conformity. This, in a small way, is what I have written about up till now. The shock of discovery and the journey towards some small way of knowing.

When I arrived I could hardly take a photograph. I could not see the distance for the trees. It came as a strange and startling revelation to find out that the thing you had taken for granted was missed – the mid ground. It seemed impossible that in the middle of a place so large I struggled to show distance. Then I went to central Australia and the problem was reversed – a place so big and wide that I could never find the detail. What it all really meant was that I had to learn to see again, to see what was actually there rather than to look for what I hoped would be there.

When I did manage to look what I saw was unfamiliar, and what I recognised was unwelcome. Banks of flowers in the Grampians that I could not name, and sparrows and blackbirds dismissed as pests. When I saw rabbits I knew the harm they did, but still liked watching them – the same with foxes. I once watched a family of foxes through the fat lens of a telescope, seeing into the darkness when the human eye failed. It was a splendid, comical sight, with the cubs ambushing their parents and the parents rough and tumbling with each other and the cubs. Once they disappeared from sight they probably moved off to drive a small native mammal to the edge of extinction. How is it possible to enjoy such a sight, when I knew what the consequences were? Then I found out that some branch of my wife’s family released rabbits into Australia. Ecological curses don’t come much harsher than that. The fact that they now eat my mother-in-law’s garden seems to be a nice act of ecological circularity.

In the evenings I would see animals with pouches running along the street wires, I liked then a lot but my wife called them “roof rabbits” and cursed their nocturnal thrashings. Eventually I saw a mammal that lays eggs – a platypus, or five to be exact. Now that was something I knew I could get excited about. I saw them at Lake Elizabeth in the Otways, west of Melbourne. The lake was formed by a landslip in 1956 and was named for a distant queen, and now it’s home to that most Australian of Australians. Each of these things peeled away layers of uncertainty, but at the same time added a feeling of distance. A combined feeling of knowing and separation that pushed understanding in one direction and acceptance in another. I began to wonder if it was possible to become Australian at all.

However, some things have. Dingos are no more “Australian” than cats, but they are accepted as being part of the ecology. They probably don’t have a history here beyond 50,000 years – now I admit that’s a long time, but it’s nothing compared to the marsupials that have been here essentially forever. Australia has lost most of its big marsupial predators and given the size of some of them it made the place safer as a result. But how much of this change was driven by the presence of a canine predator that was brought here by man? In Queensland they still organise hunts to remove cane toads – a noxious predator that was brought here by man as well. But the dingo is considered part of the scene and the Cane Toad is not. How long will it take for this to change – if it ever changes? What about the sparrows – two species -, the Mynah and the host of other species that are now common, when will they be Australian? What about the ivy that creeps with powerful fingers through the lats of my fence, pushing apart the handiwork of last summer? And if we could remove them at the click of a switch or the sweep of a wand, what would replace them? I doubt very much that the displaced species would come back to their old haunts, they’re too changed, too damaged, too fractured. So an understanding of what is Australian and what is imported, alien and undesirable is, to say the least, blurred at the edges.
Trying to understand a new place seems to butt up against that classic quantum problem of not being able to measure two things at the same time. You can measure speed but not direction, or the other way around. So in a place that’s new if you concentrate on one thing, you lose sight of another. And when you regain sight of the thing you have lost, it’s changed.

When I first travelled out to the west of the state I saw flocks of white parrots – Short Billed Corellas. The maps said I should find them there and find them I did. Sometimes on the ground, gathering at field edges, mining for roots and sometimes in the air in noisy, loose flocks. They were where conventional wisdom said they would be – and this was easy to understand.

But this winter they have moved into the suburbs. By concentrating on location I’d lost track of movement. The Corellas were feasting on Liquid Amber seed pods and flying over my house, calling me to peer out of the window regardless of time or purpose. I found a flock on the road, on the way to work, and I stopped to photograph them. They owned the place. As cars inched their way through the flock I had to shoo the birds out from under the wheels. It was as noisy as before and now some birds mined the nature strip rather than field edges. Was this an expansion or a return? And how would I recognise the difference anyway?

In the last week I’ve found two species of lizard around my house – and bear in mind that we are solidly into winter here, so it’s not prime lizard season. If I find one more species that’s the same number as the whole of the UK. A Southern Marbled Gecko, with splayed sticky feet, rushed out from beneath a bag and hid under the coat stand. When it sat on your hand you could see its ribs pumping in and out. It was a little over an inch long. Last night, as I split the wood for the fire, a skink of some sort shot out from under the bark of a log. It had lost the tip of its tail in the past and it scuttled away, probably less than pleased to have been disturbed. Reptiles are still a novelty. When I left the UK I had seen two thirds of all the species of snake to be found there, which seems impressive. But what it means is that I had seen both of the common English snakes, and had never seen a Smooth Snake – a rare southern heath dweller – and that sounds much less impressive than before. I could probably exceed that count within a kilometre of my house right now.On most days I can find invertebrates in my garden that you would only find in nature reserves in the UK. A Praying Mantis that would stretch across the palm of my hand calmly lays its eggs just outside my front door. It leaves a shiny, silver package; something to check each day as I go to work. As a kid I watched Raft Spiders fishing in wheelbarrow sized ponds near the village of Street. These are the UK’s largest spider; but really they are not that big. As far as I am concerned Huntsmen are big - and ugly - and distinctly unwelcome as they walk along the bedroom wall, up on to the ceiling and (in the worst part of this journey) across the ceiling above the bed, down the curtains and out through the window. Once that journey is over I can unclench my toes and almost relax. If an invertebrate can have a sense of theatre, then a Huntsman has it in spades. I found one a while back, sitting on a brick wall. Just lurking there on the edge of a pedestrian’s peripheral vision. Any further away and it would have been hidden, any further out and it would have been visible before you drew level with it. I actually think it was hoping to scare its prey to death. It almost worked. In the past all this weighed heavily on me – I felt I did not know any of the names, any of the stories, of the things that I saw or the places I visited. But that wasn’t true. What was true was that I was not ready yet for them to become part of my own story. I was not really here, and I was sure as hell not there either. I was trapped in between, looking for one and finding the other. Heavy clouds stacked around me. It seemed that even in drought the sun did not shine. The tug of deep, lifelong interest dragged against the sheet anchor of despair. Each day the line between them grew tighter and tighter until it pulled me out of shape and remade me in a way that I hated.

When the force grew too great, the line snapped, and without an anchor I fell. I grabbed the only thing I knew I knew. I pulled my family in tight around me, and hoped that the storm would pass. Eventually it did. But what I saw when the clouds cleared surprised me. It was not the damp woodlands of Somerset, the cold shores of Northumbria, the open hills of the Lakes, but it was a place I recognised. My insistence that this was a place I could not understand was a recipe for disaster, a philosophy of despair, I had to open my eyes and pay attention.

I had planned to write this as my 50th post – as some kind of way-point on the way to who knows where. But I forgot. I was too busy looking. I was too busy becoming less of a stranger in a land that becomes less strange with each passing day.

......went up the hill.

2011-06-06T20:38:00.027+10:00

The wind that blew the clouds away had a harsh, cutting edge. It sliced through you. It made you wear layers. It made you wear a hat. On that windy night we saw the first sparkle of stars. A few patches of cloud were still fleeing before the breath of the wind; they promised more rain, but it never came. A kind of gunboat weather, all threat, but no action.

Under a cold, broken, patchwork sky, we drove north towards Bicheno. The rivers were still filling from the recent rain; they strained at the bridges and flirted with the idea of flooding. The tyres hissed on the wet road, fields shone with water, ditches were full. In places the road disappeared entirely. Even in the car you could smell water and damp leaves and freshly turned soil.

We ate a meal of quiet exceptional ordinariness in a shop that was for sale, and where it was clear that the staff had long since lost the capacity to smile. Just metres from the sea we ate fish that seemed to have been caught just before the fall of the Roman Empire, and chips that were made of cotton wool and lino. For once, tomato sauce felt more of a necessity than an indulgence. Some you win, some you lose.

The bus that would take us to the penguins was due in a few minutes. People gathered in a car park, in the darkness, outside a surf shop. Some went inside, so I joined them. The shop was mercifully free of sweatshop penguin tat. There was no café. There was no flash, commercial AV production. There was no metre high plastic penguin set in a “realistic diorama” for you to lean against, flashing a peace sign, while your friends take your picture. There was just quiet conversation and over-dressed families waiting for the bus. I took all of these as good signs. As we fastened our seat belts the layers of fleece, down and gortex that most people were wearing formed wide, glacial valleys in the clothes. A lady with a Scottish accent and a woollen hat laughed at the excess. My kids looked warm, pulled their hats over their eyes and lost their gloves. A slight sea mist turned the bus’s headlights into solid beams that flicked out in front of the bus, searching. A wallaby stood by the roadside confused by the light before it disappeared in a quantum of movement into the darkness.

Your suitably bearded guide gathered us into a group and talked about the walk ahead. “Watch your step”, he said as we walked down towards the sea. Both H and P were excited, and if the truth be told, so was I. After a few hundred metres we found your first birds. I’m not sure who looked the more embarrassed, the penguins or us. But it was clear we were both watching each other. Both groups, penguins and people, looked a little over dressed. Both groups shuffled their feet and glanced around, not really sure of what to do. We knew what not to do: no flash photography, in fact no photography at all, no torches, no sudden movements and definitely no picking up the penguins! The penguins seemed to be working to the same set of rules.

Apart from the occasional violent beak shake to flick out saline snot, the birds just stood there and we just stood there too. The birds were probably a wee bit confused, but we stood still because we were all just a little bit charmed. After a while the penguins waddled off, with each rocking step seeming to hover on the edge of a fall. They walked stiff legged as if they were on stilts, rocking from left to right on rigid legs. We met a group of birds – a parcel apparently – coming up a side path. We went through the same embarrassed observations, of watching the watchers. In the thick bushes and undergrowth the birds were settling in for the night, and noisy conversations were being had at the mouths of nest tunnels. Some of the birds used boxes to nest in, and lifting the lid revealed the rather smelly interior. Some birds were in moult, some were busy trying to make new penguins, and some birds looked frankly bored – with an “oh, it’s you again is it?” look on their face. The shrieking and hooting continued, and I imagine the place would have been very noisy in peak season. We looped back towards the bus, and soon were on the way back. There were no frills here, just the penguins, the night and the sea. But with birds like that, do you really need anything else? I think not.

Within minutes of leaving P is asleep, slumped, floppy necked in her seat. But H is different. He sits there, eyes wide with the expectation of hope and the novelty of night driving. A real set of cat’s eyes flashes from a fence line, a fearsome alien hunter of night time natives. Possums dash through the lights with frightening disregard for their own safety, a few wallabies stand and stare. There are no devils – they have already been lost from here.

The darkness outside the car was not only broken by the headlights beam, but also by night sounds from the damp roadside. We would drive into the hot spots of frog calls, where the whole night was dominated by their calls. Even over the gentle voice of the radio the frogs were clear, but then as suddenly as they had come they would be gone and the night felt even more silent than before. We arrived home to a set fire and welcome beds. The wind had dropped and the sky was clear. There were stars and satellites and even the distant call of the waves seemed softer.
Finally I awoke to bright sunlight. Motes of dust floated in sun warmed counter currents. The sea purred in the background, like a well fed cat. The advertised view was, for the first time, viewable. This was a day for a walk. We headed out to find another icon, but this time we were under a clear blue sky. We were not the only ones headed for Wineglass Bay that day; it’s a Freycinet classic walk. We left the car park, past people in long red socks and heavy sweaters and past people in dollar thongs and crop tops. Within moments of leaving it was clear that this was not a day for a long walk. It was a day for many, many short walks. The kids rattled from one side of the path to the other, responding to the pin ball ricochet of interest found. The walk became a jigsaw of discovery, as attention ebbed and flowed. It became a walk defined by width as much as length.

The hillside rocks look like a rabbit or a dinosaur or a fish – we all stop. A Scarlet Robin hides in the bushes – I stop. The kids hear a frog – they stop. A splendidly large black beetle walks across the path and we all stop again. We rescue the beetle from the feet of other walkers and leave it on a log. Later when I look at the pictures I can see that the beast has a mite infection – lodged down between head and thorax are dozen of tiny creatures; one crawls over the beetle’s wing case. And no doubt deep in the guts of the mite are tiny parasites living off it as well – “and little fleas have lesser fleas ..... and so on, infinitum”.
We see views, we eat some chocolate until the left and right, stop start walk brings us to the top.

Laid out in front of us is Horseshoe Bay, a sweep of clean white sand sheltered in a deep bay. Long, long ago I climbed to the top of Mt. Amos and looked down on this bay from a greater height and the water was so clear you could see the diamond kites of stingrays swimming in the water. Ghosting in invisible currents, sliding along level with the shore. On this day I don’t see such things. But it’s good none the less. People come and go with surprising rapidity. See the view, take some pictures and head back down. Some seem to stay for only a few minutes. We don’t stay too long, the kids need some food, and what’s a view to an eight year old when there’s chocolate and jelly snakes in mums bag! We decide to go down, but not to the car park. We don’t know if it’s wise, but we head for the beach.
The path to the beach is very different from the path to the viewpoint. The up path was testament to hard work. It was edged and smooth, the streams were bridged with care and cunning design. You felt sure there must be trolls under them. The down path was a testament to erosion. The up was a motorway, the down a little used track, a greenway, a winding and inviting way. Trees and bushes hung over the path, making a patchwork of light and shade. Even the kids seemed to notice the difference. There were occasional, mysterious rustlings in the bushes. They walk slower, they don’t dash off, and eventually we reach the beach.

Parts of the beach are thick with the weed we had seen elsewhere, orange and smelly. But where the sand was bare it your eyes hurt. The waves splashed over rocks rounded by the long passage of time, the dry sand squeaked if you shuffled your feet. There was a deep, child attracting pool, a dammed stream at the top of the beach, and in it tiny speaks of life swarmed with jerky movements. A tame wallaby posed for photographs and tried to eat your lunch. People found it charming until it bit them. The sky was crystal, the sea was sharp, there was no softness, but there was beauty. It may even have been breath-taking.
Certainly the people struggling back up the hill had had their breath taken away. They were passed by two small children, fuelled by chocolate and the quest for a special tree. It became a game of hide and seek between the tree and my daughter. The tree won. There is a chair shaped like a bed (or possibly a bed that passes for a chair) at the top of the hill and we stopped to drink some water. We were visited by wattle birds and watched by cautious ravens. People converged on the top from both directions, arriving “puffing, panting and a little pink”. Our chocolate stocks depleted, we head back down to the car park. We reach a path junction where the parks authority wants us to walk back by a slightly different route. It’s the first one way system in a national park I’ve seen. This place must be very different in peak season.

The next day is our last and we steal one more walk on the beach. It’s clean and flat and the kids run for no other reason that that they can. The waves in the bay have flattened to almost nothing. We find more shells, more birds, more crabs. The river still runs to the sea. It’s time to leave.

The road out brings one more treat. In the mirror I can see The Hazards stretched out across the sky line. The road is almost dry, but small puddles mirror the sky – patches of deep blue in the grey of the road. The traffic signs make me laugh, and I’m thankful we have not been attacked by giant kangaroos.

We drive north to a boat and sail north again to home. It’s good to go away and it’s good to come back.

I can see clearly now …..

2011-05-17T20:31:00.024+10:00

When I awoke the crackle pop of the egg fryer waterfall outside the window had stopped. I listened to the unfamiliar creaks and clicks as our week only house expanded into a new day. It was quiet, but not silent, it was not raining. The sky was still heavy and grey and you could smell the promise of more rain, but for now none fell. I could hear the waves as they whoosh-crashed on the beach. The light leaking around the curtain’s edge was pale and weak, bounced and reflected. A small person arrives, claiming the warmth of other people’s sleep, and talks and talks and talks. Talks in circles and talks in straight lines. Talks of this and talks of that. The kettle sings. The day begins.

Under still dark skies we go to find an icon. In most shops you would see images of Tasmanian Devils. Chunky animals, with a white chest stripe, and ears that flare red when they are angry, they make an ideal, but unrealistic, soft toy. When I was in Tasmania a decade ago you would see them by the side of road, arguing - with bright red ears - over road kill. They sneaked down river sides in the falling light, and sometimes you saw them in car parks. But most often it was by the road, flashed in the headlight’s glare. But that was 10 years ago and now they are gone from the east. In another ten years the largest surviving marsupial carnivore may be surviving no more, gone the way of the dodo and thylacine.

A little way north of Coles Bay is a wildlife sanctuary - a zoo really. And here you can see Devils. Remarkable animals, thick set and rugged. A barrel on legs. Their jaws open surprisingly wide, and size for size they bite harder than almost any other animal. They have a strange, rolling gait, as if their back legs are about half a second behind their front. They fight and squabble with admirable passion; they squeak, squall and scream with the voice that gave them their name. But for all their vigour, these are caged animals, and day by day the chances of seeing one in the wild fall.

As we entered the zoo it started to rain, which seemed appropriate really. In 1996 a Devil was found with facial tumours, cancers that were destroying its face, starving it to death. The disease spread and was called, with the brutal simplicity of science, Devil Facial Tumour Disease. It could have just been called Death Sentence, for no Devil that has contracted it is known to have survived. The cancer itself is spread by contact between Devils, making it one of the few transmissible cancers known to science. Tasmanian Devils are all remarkably similar genetically, and this adds to the problem - if the cancer kills one, it kills them all. Things are being done - insurance populations on islands, gene sequencing, breeding programs in zoos, but if my kids are to see these animals in wild in years to come what we need to act now and we need to spend money. I’m struck that the AFL has just sold the rights to a football game that is really only of interest to Australians for $1.4 billion. What could be achieved for the Devils with that amount of money? How much biodiversity could we protect with that amount of money? People could claim that AFL contributes to world sporting “biodiversity” and that the world would be a poorer place if it was lost - and I’m sure that’s true. But it’s a construct that could be resurrected at any time. Once the Devils have gone they’re gone for all time. Watching this animal become extinct whilst we spend more treasure than most people can imagine on sport - and for that matter royal weddings - seems short sighted beyond belief. I’d trade a truck load of Olympic gold and decades of live sport on TV for healthy Devils, howling in the Tasmanian night.

And what would I have done if I’d seen a Devil in the wild, with a ruined face and only weeks to live? Would I have photographed it? Yes. Would I have put the pictures on this blog? Almost certainly. It would have given me a reference point the next time I was challenged about evolution. Or asked about plans and purpose, design and destiny. What are these plans? What is the purpose of letting an animal die in pain and starvation? The blank, flat truth is that there is no plan, and saving this animal requires human action not divine intervention. And the quicker we start, the more likely we will get a better outcome for the devils. (If you can hear a hiss in the background here, it’s just me letting off steam!)

I leave with selfish worries about the kind of world my kids will come to know. I wonder if there will still be wonder, I worry about the spread of brutality and the lack of hope. A grey sky mood in slight, drifting rain. But it’s a mood the kids don’t share. They roar like Devils, they talk to the parrots who sometimes talk back, they bounce like kangaroos. They remain kids and the world is, for now at least, a playground of wonder and adventure. My mood changes in an instant, and under skies which now seem to be clearer we head for the beach.

Running up the east coast, running away from Coles Bay, are the Friendly Beaches. Walking here was like entering a world that had lost most of its colour. The sky was (still) grey, the water was grey, the sand was pale and littered with round grey stones. Even the birds were black and white. It was a space dominated by tone rather than colour, and strangely what little colour you could find was orange lichen or the blood-red stab of an oystercatcher’s beak. Lichens painted patches of rock with vivid colour, and in places orange seaweed was heaped up or spread over the beach. The land may have cast from a single greyscale pallet, but the air was full of smells - especially around the piles of seaweed. There was a tangible, almost tactile sense of sulphur in the air; it was strongest by the weed, which I took as its source.

Thankfully and surprisingly, beyond the tide cast weed there was little else on the beach. But the beach was not entirely free of human litter. Every now and then, at odd intervals, you could find walnuts. Whole walnuts, still in the shell, and still sound when you cracked open the shell. Did they speak of some small shipping disaster, or just a single large bag fallen overboard? We walked until we choose to stop, along a beach that went on in front of us to the horizon and followed for miles behind. Then we turned and walked back.

Other beaches were smaller, coves you might even say. Here all that the sea had brought was heaped into deep piles, with no room to spread. The same sulphur smell pinched my nose. Shells were heaped up in piles on the beach, the silver sheen of oysters, not long dead. Pointed shells, blunt shells, broken and whole, some with needle holes where death came to visit.

On the piles of weed a Forest Raven searched with bright eyes and sudden movement. Blue under the clouded sky, not black. The large beak made small delicate movements, flicking aside weed and stones, foraging, feeding, finding. The sun set and for the first time this week the stones and rock faces flared red in the light of a clearing sky.

Obscured by Clouds.

2011-04-30T19:05:00.033+10:00

Tasmania sits to the south of the Australian mainland, isolated from the larger island by Bass Strait - a wild and rock studded stretch of water with a reputation for danger and seasickness. The Spirit of Tasmania chugs backwards and forwards across Bass Strait on a daily basis, bringing eager visitors one way, and somewhat damper returnees the other way. Amongst other things Tasmania has a reputation for rain, scenery and wildlife - we wanted to avoid the first, soak up the second and watch the third. As it turned out, we were soaked by the first, had trouble seeing the second and managed to find a few of the third.

Most holidays start with frantic packing, unpacking, repacking and frayed tempers. The late arrival of a large box of toys for the kids is likely to strain the relationship between the provider of packages and the car packer. The kids are both bored and overexcited. But finally we are packed, and surprisingly it’s late in the afternoon, but that’s OK. The short drive to the ferry terminal only lasts about 30 minutes, far better than the longer drive to other destinations. However, getting onto the boat itself is a much slower business. Minutes tick past and we don’t move; it’s like checking in for a flight, but whilst sitting inside motor powered luggage. After 40 minutes we have moved forward a car’s length. Security checks the luggage, the roof box and the engine bay. They check for pets, fruit, damp fishing tackle and gas canisters. Tasmania is clearly under threat from people casting explosive cats and apples in all directions. P needs the bathroom. I need a drink. We all need to move forward. Eventually we get on board and move off to our cabin.

Real Estate agents may have described the cabin as “deceptively spacious” - but I would have described it as tiny. The cubby house in our garden is about the same size, although it has more spiders. Clearly the probation on pets is because you would not have room to swing a cat, although you may have had no problems swinging a hamster if you had the inclination - but at least we knew it was all ours. Outside in the cheap seats people were engaged in strategic manoeuvres for seats and sleeping spots. On the upper decks sleeping bags had been laid out to claim the best spots. Dinner was served by the plate - flat rate dining with an emphasis on size rather than substance. Mothers cautioned their children about overeating and the perils of seasickness and then proceeded to polish off enough food to feed a small nation. I know that I’m a snob. I finish my meal, encourage the rest to do the same and head off for bed.

The room is vibrating. It’s not the waves. It’s not the beer either before you ask. The engines shake the whole ship with a kind of 6/8 beat, with occasional bars of 2/4 thrown in for good measure. Free form engine jazz. It does not encourage sleep. The top bunks offer little headroom, but at least the kids are asleep and we are moving. Tasmania comes closer with every passing minute. Devonport arrives in the wee hours of the morning. The dock is lined with the markers of seaside arrival; car parks, old sheds, rusting machines of unknown purpose. We hurry to the car deck and then wait. And wait. We wait again as we pass through security again - we are checked for pets, fruit, damp fishing tackle and gas canisters - again, and strangely we still don’t have any.

We drive into the island state and it rapidly becomes clear that things are different. The landscape seems to be a contradiction, both small and large at the same time. The land is folded, creased in intimate ways, with tiny patches and twists, but it is also filled with greater distance and larger size. While some roads are the ruler straight byways of the mainland, roads that seem to make no concession to the landscape, others are twisted and plastic. These roads flow through the landscape rather than just bisect it. These are roads that have been made with the landscape, the easiest way rather than the fastest way. Not for the last time I am reminded of England. Small roads. Patches of woodland. Steep sided valleys, tiny and almost hidden, with fast flowing streams. In places there are stone walls by the side of the road. But then the distance appears and the illusion of Englishness fades. The distant hills are fuzzy at the edges with trees. The paddock trees are huge, but straight, with leaves and branches growing in clumps. They have few low side branches. When these trees were young they were forest trees, and their form still shows this. They are the ghosts of a forest that has only recently been lost.

We pass through small towns; they may even be villages, with equally small churches. Towers and spires, arches and stained glass windows. Many of the buildings have rough edges and still bear the marks of simple construction. They lack the ostentatious grandeur of goldfield churches and buildings, but they fit into the landscape. They seem to sit low to the ground, and come from it rather than rest upon it. They seem part rather than placed, a part rather than apart.

The thoughts and memories come think and fast, the landscape a mental trigger to elsewheres and elsewhens. The turn of the road here, the shape of the land there, each seems to hold something that takes me away from the here and now. Such thoughts come with the golden glow of a memory and the blue funk of regret. Why can’t I just see this place for what it is rather than try to build bridges to a place which, because of time, no longer exists. The car swerves to avoid a wallaby and I am back in the here and now. Brought back by one of the true markers of difference, as if the place knew what I was thinking and needed to give me a gentle nudge.

We head south and east, towards Freycinet. It’s a picture postcard place, featured on tourist maps and calendars, and even under a grey sky the first glimpse of the Hazards is exciting. They are a chain of round top hills that fall away into the sea and form one side of Coles Bay. The town of Coles Bay itself sits across from the Hazards with a fine view, and a waiting house. The car disturbs butterflies from the drive, dozens of them. It’s an unexpected greeting. The air outside the car has an autumn chill, brought by southern latitude and winds. I moved south as the sun moved and seasons had rushed ahead of me, one a day away from home and a week closer to winter. As unpack the car it starts to rain. Light and windswept, but rain. By the time I finish unpacking the car it’s not light but it’s still windblown. It continues to rain for the next 72 hours - almost non-stop.

The clouds are at sea level, and the see level is just about zero. We settle into the house and find comfort in card games and the soft heat from a pot bellied stove. Occasionally a dragon hiss boils up from the fire as rain leaks through the roof. The near horizontal rain pushes its way between the chimney and the roof and comes inside to join us. A rust red streak on the fire shows that this has happened before.

That night I fell asleep to the crackle of water falling from the gutter onto the decking outside the window. It sounded like the violent pop and fizzle of an egg frying in over heated oil, irregular and sharp. When I woke in the morning it was still going. There was no view to speak of from the house, and for much of the time there may have been no garden either - I had no real way of telling. Water was running down the track to the house in coffee brown steams, taking the soil down to the sea. A few birds sulked in the undergrowth and there were no butterflies.
Under these conditions there is only one thing to do - go outside. It’s not a matter of if you are going to get wet, that’s a given, it’s just a matter of whether you care about getting wet. Rain walking has more appeal than many people think. Down by the sea the low tide had exposed rocks and beds of kelp - perfect conditions for rock pooling. Once the first crab dashed for cover when a rock was lifted any thought of rain whooshed from the kids’ heads. Crabs! Lots of Crabs! Purple crabs, crabs with strange long claws, soldier crabs on the sand. This was a playground of the inquisitive, a source of adventure for the curious. Chitons - “like fossils” - cling to the rocks, sea anemones - “like jelly sweets” - hide in the depths and starfish - “Patrick!” - are all found. The waters here are so rich that we find fish on the beach, as if a wave has just left it there. The solider crabs twist themselves into the sand, round and round, building delicate sand hideaways. A White-faced Heron hunts by the rocks, and the crabs panic. Gulls drift past, the tide turns, time passes and still it rains. Nobody seems to care. Warm drinks and towels wait back at the house; it’s all you need.

The next day brought yet more rain. The land was saturated with water, it lapped at the edges of the road, it pushed against window frames, it filled the rivers to bursting. The swollen streams meant even beach walks became difficult, each one barred the way. Some could be jumped, most were too deep, too fast. Eventually the clouds began to lift, but some, reluctant to leave, lingered. They formed lines and patches on the hill tops, some looked like chains of smoke, some looked like crowns. But whatever they looked like, they stayed. That afternoon the clouds gathered back together and the rain fell with a renewed vigour. A White-bellied sea eagle flew through the clouds, its grey wings the same shade as the sky, only its named belly really showing. As it flew away it became a white patch in a grey sky, like a glimpse of the sun peaking through.

I hoped it was a sign of things to come.

In the wake of the flood.

2011-04-19T20:48:00.049+10:00

There’s a mark, a line really, along the banks of the Yarra at Studley Park where the flood water flowed. It pulled out the creeping plants, pushed over smaller trees and took them all downstream. Some trees are hung with a flood washed tat, like dowdy, unloved Christmas trees, trimmed with junk. Bottles are lodged in the crooks of branches, ragged sheets of plastic flap. When the river was pushing through, heavy with soil and waste, you could hear the collisions of the river junk on the tree branches - it sounded like a low pitched rattle buzz. Where branches fingered the water the abandoned consumer crap built up in moving layers. Water bottles, possibly bought by the health conscious, seemed to be the most common items, followed by the smashed remains of polystyrene packaging. They hissed and fizzed on the surface, constantly in motion. Sometimes, they organised themselves in a way that convulsed the whole surface of the water and a breakaway raft of junk would be swept downstream. Larger items, trees, barrels and the prow of a canoe, pass by. The viewing platform buzzed with collisions, and occasionally it shook as larger, unseen, objects rammed into it. The hire boats were heaped up, partially submerged. The ducks looked lost, having probably never seen anything like this before. Our rain gauge filled and it kept raining. People were being warned not to swim in swollen rivers, which was clearly good advice, but it was also remarkable that it was needed.

Around the river a grey green sheen had been laid over plants and paths alike. It looked like some huge slug had left a slime trail over the world and now it was drying out. Drying to dusty powder that made you sneeze, clogged the gears of your bike and stuck like glue to your shoes. The flood’s edge was marked by a shift from grey to green, and its height showed in the snaggle tangle of plants on fence wires and gate rails.

The rain has gone now, but not its impact. I went north and west - towards the Grampians - to see what was about, to see what had happened in the wake of the flood.

“Drive 109km, then keep left” - not even turn left, just keep left. That in itself was enough to tell me this would be a dull drive. Not even the novelty of changing gear or actually moving the steering wheel. An arm droops from a truck window, an elbow from another. A tradie in his rust bucket ute drinks a beer, his dog pokes its head around the cab, mouth open catching flies, ears flapping like flags. At the end of a long driveway a green wheelie bin sits without a home in sight. Taking out the rubbish must be a real chore.

I head west, out of Melbourne, towards Horsham and into the sunset. In places smoke drifts across the road turning the world pink and grey. Fire trucks with flashing lights park up by the side of the road. The lights finger through the thickening air. They wait for a fire that today, does not come. This is a controlled burn, a “fuel reduction burn” as if there could be any other type of fire. Knocking down next summer’s fires with an autumn burn, fighting fire with fire. You can taste the acrid smoke, and even in the car your eyes sting a little. To the left of the road a pillar of smoke rises and grows, but I follow the setting sun instead. The world fades down to grey, a world of tone rather than colour, but at the same time the sky comes to life. Flaring out of the west. Silky fingers of cloud seem to flow from a hole at the horizon’s edge, from where the road meets the sky. A cloud fan of colour fills the sky. The Sat Nav becomes redundant as I follow this celestial guide. Even in the fading light you can see water. Roadside ditches flow, dams are full, fields are flooded. Lakes that have always been a distant spectre lap at the roads edge.

The hotel in Horsham is clean, efficient and utterly anonymous, although I do have a fine view of a local roundabout. The fire fighters from down the road organise beer and dinner, the roundabout attracts teenage drivers with money and rubber to burn. As ever, sleep comes slowly in a strange bed.

The next morning shows no sign of rain or flood and I go to have a look at Lake Hindmarsh. For most of the last ten years Lake Hindmarsh has not been a lake at all and it’s barely been a marsh either. But the waters from local rain and the more distant floods have reached this lake. It’s a stopover on the way to other things, but at present the water takes a pause and fills it. You would have thought a lake of this size would have been easy to find - but that was not the case. Roads were still closed from the recent floods and I only found out about this when I arrived at the ‘road closed’ signs. This was not good for the blood pressure, but it did mean I did far more exploring than I had anticipated.

The landscape was flat and dominated by agriculture; fences, broken down gates, mysterious buildings seemingly dropped into the fields and paddocks at random. Some seemed to have been long abandoned, filled with rusting material and mouldy bales of hay. On some of those fence lines there were the remains of foxes, caught and hung up to rot. The tails moved slightly in the wind, a counterfeit of life. Proof that somewhere in this seemingly empty landscape farming still went on. The fox is not native to Australia and it has been justifiably demonised, so on fence wires and in the middle of the road their bodies are left to rot.

This region has been damaged by drought and then in the first year of recovery, inundated by flood. Crops lie damaged and unharvested in the fields, fence lines are battered and hung with dead plants, with branches and logs forced through the wire. Under the flush of new growth you could see the way the dead grass had all been been laid flat by the flowing water, neatly combed like a child’s hair.

Grasshoppers sprang in large numbers from the long roadside grass. They would smack into the windscreen, lodge in the radiator grill, and die in a splattered mess on the front of your car. Locals have spread a layer of shade cloth over the fronts of their cars - letting the air through, but keeping the bugs out. Red Rumped Parrots fly in flocks and a Brown Falcon hunts by the road side. A pied butcher bird flies in front of the car, and then dives off to the side and sits on a fence post. Its call is mellow and clear. The last time I saw one of these I was in Brisbane and the floods had yet to flow. You could see life and death in one glance. Ruined crops and natural growth side by side.

It is a Cartesian landscape, dominated by straight lines, with roads disappearing into distant vanishing points. The paddocks are squares and rectangles, the road junctions meet at right angles; seen from above the only curved lines would be creek lines, and many of these have been reduced to little more than canals. But next to the roads are strips of wildness that are unplanned and ragged, like the muscular plants that push through the gaps in the pavement, steroid dandelions, roided up hawkweeds, feral plants, wild plants. These edges are thriving, when the laser planed paddocks are empty. They are unseen places, sitting between the realm of road and agriculture. In many places they are the last common ground, unwatched, neglected and thriving. Human intervention seemed rare in these places and when it was visible it seemed to be about the celebration of ghosts. A large boulder with a metal plaque marks the point where a school once stood - years ago, life-times ago. But now there is no sign of people or place. The names of the maps are ghosts as well, as you drive you pass road signs that have nothing near them. They exist only in the historical and flat world of maps and records.

When I eventually get to Lake Hindmarsh I don’t recognise it. As I drive over a slight rise, acres of rippled brown are laid out before me. I don’t recognise it as a lake. It looks alien and imposed. It’s the wrong colour, it’s the wrong texture; its just wrong. Apart from the fact that it’s huge, it looks misplaced. For a short while it looks like some huge installation art work that doesn’t really work. A good idea misplaced, many dollars misspent. Where I gain access to the lake is a camp site. And like most camp sites, it is filled with a combination of beauty and destruction, broken bottles and shiny yellow flowers, rusty tins and the glitter flash of the wings of dragonflies. But most of the lake itself is empty of all but water. Two white faced herons stalk the margins, and swallows hawk for insects. A mouse spider, red and blue, stumbles over the sand. I had expected more. I had hoped for more. But the abundance of water seems to have spread living over the land. After I short while I leave, but this time the slight rise of the land shows something else.

Flooded paddocks flanked the road and in them were birds aplenty. Here was the abundance I had thought I would find. But it was not anywhere special or designated, it was on some old rough pasture, a flooded field, a piece of edgelands. Such places are important because they are often overlooked and neglected, they are places people pass on the way to elsewhere. In the damp and flooded grass Red Kneed Dotterels and Black Tailed Native Hens ran and fed. Red Rumped parrots perched on the wire fence and flew down to drink from puddles and pools. Ducklings splashed and chased in the ditches. Welcome Swallows hawked over the grass and along the road. Whistling Kites flew overhead and scared the other birds. Other cars pass by, with driver and passengers looking at the strange man with a telescope. They park by the full but empty lake and then they leave. They don’t see the Australasian Hobby, they miss the dragon flies but they do leave a pizza box and cola bottles. Sometimes despair is hard to avoid.
On the way home I pull over to look at Green Lake. Six months ago this was a field, as it had been for the best part of ten years, but not now. The boat ramp seemed to be covered in weeds - but this made no sense, the lake would have been over the road if it was weed. On closer inspection the weed turned out to be the discarded cases of dragonfly nymphs.

The piles of the pier and the nearby trees were thick with them. Sometimes they were linked together in discarded streamers, one case on another and another and another. The water’s edge was thick with cases and the bodies of the dead and the malformed.

A few dragonflies were still pulling themselves from cases, eyes first, then the body and wings. Dozens of adults were trapped in spider webs, or caught somehow on branches and twigs. The numbers were astounding.

If the lake really has been dry for a decade, where did these weird, alien creatures come from? It felt like an ecological resurrection, a real reason for celebration. I left the lake and headed home, away from the floods lands, away from the wake of the flood.

Beachcombing.

2011-03-29T22:04:00.015+11:00

I stand on the sandy footprinted beach, look out to sea, watch the waves and wonder; are any of these waves the reflected after shadows of the Japanese tsunami? Are any of these the haunted wave memory of the shifted seabed, the plunging aftershock, the tortured water that came ashore like a strange spreading cloud? I doubt it, but the very idea brings the need for stillness and thought. If you had ever seen such things, how could you look out to sea or even stand on land and not believe that lasting change, random change, could occur at any moment. If the sea can rise up, the land fall away and sweep all before it, how can you look at a hill or a wave and not feel the uncertainty of fear? If the foundations of the earth can be torn apart, if the oceans can cover the land, how do you not feel fear each new coming second?

The riches of the Earth boil to the surface in the very places where it is mobile and weakest. At plate boundaries, the intermittent slip slide of edges brings wealth most days and destruction on just a few. It’s a gamble that few volunteered for and many live with. It’s a numbers game. But if the dice is thrown enough times, in the end, surely, 00 will come up and that 1 in 100 day will arrive, bringing fear, death and suffering. On such days it would be better to be elsewhere. I look down at the rocks at my feet and know that today, here, is not such a day. I don’t know, not really, not in any real way, but the odds are stacked in my favour. The dice always favour the house, and this is my house. Australia is old and stable, resting on its own plate, miles from the action. P finds a crab and H plays at the water’s edge - the day returns, the remote becomes impossible and a protective shield of denial forms between my mind and all that is possible. It’s only natural.

A silver gull flashes over the beach, a grey and silver wind knife. The sand sings in the bright sun, exposed at the turning of the tide. Water rushes out of Port Phillip Bay. It leaves a scribbled handwriting of waves and foam, of rushes and deep slack eddies, dull undercurrents and fierce, dragging tides. It boils without being hot and a dull smoky roar grinds in the background. Waves break and run. This place is solid, not secure. What you find today will be gone tomorrow, there are few fixed points and reality is as fluid as a lie. The gulls ghost over wave tops and barrel through the sine wave trough between them. Here they really are sea gulls; fluid and white, suitable, suited and fit. Staggered drifts of terns, sea butterflies, pass with bouncing direct flight. A gargoyle cormorant, black and heavy, sits on a greening rock - a solid bird, a bird of water as much as air - guarding the water way to the Bay. The light house, white and smooth, sits on another rock, safe from wave wash and tide spray. It too guards the way into the Bay. The bird and the lighthouse, both watching the running tide of The Rip.

The rocks below the lighthouse seem to have an extra layer today - a grey that coats the green. A silt overcoat, a matt cover to hide the gloss of weed and water. The sea weeds look old and tired, as if they have been land wrecked for too long. The turning tide will wash away many things, but here it may bring clean water to sluice the flood's silty wrapper. Red-necked stints flush from the water’s edge and fly, sometimes above, sometimes below the horizon. This seems suitable for such an edge dweller as it passes from sea to sky and back again. Overhead planes and helicopters spook the birds and drive them to flight.

The wind sings a song of sand and surf and when I close my eyes I could be anywhere, surrounded by the world music of the sea; dull Sunday mornings on the North Sea; bright childhood summer days looking out across the Severn’s mud towards Wales; the empty beaches of western Ireland, with nothing but sea between me and the USA, waiting for letters that seldom came; the beach below Forks, strewn with fallen trees, with a peregrine high on the a cliff edge tree, back when Forks was a real place rather than a fiction. They blend to become an every-beach, each individual, but each the same. Visit a new beach and, more often than not, it's like tuning into a new radio station that plays the same music as your favourite, but with different presenters.

Behind the beach, past the car parks and wind harrowed trees, the land flattens into pasture. Stripped of trees and put down to grass, with sheep gathering in what little shade they can find. Ravens hop and peck, opportunistic camp followers, unloved. Some pastures run to long grass, and in damp flushes flowers bloom. Yellow. White. A sweep of shocking pink flowers covers one paddock. Apparently they are called Naked Ladies, as they burst from the soil bare, with no leaves. I feel strangely reluctant to Google their name for further information. Their part of the paddock is rich with a thick scent, heady and smelling of Boots the Chemist or the cheap perfume applied prior to teenage parties - spray and walk. Human perfume is about the contradiction of attraction and concealment, but in the flowers it’s all about attraction. The insects fly their way down the perfume river, arriving at the source hungry and leaving with more than just a sweet drink. Pollen on the move, the vector for plant sex. The smell seems rather sickly sweet - jelly and ice cream, toffee apples and hint of rot, but it has not evolved for me or my clumsy nose. Butterflies rise in strange abundance, clouds even, from the long grass. Is this what it was always like before we waged chemical war on the pestilent and the pretty alike, is this what it was like before the springs were silent? Blues, white and patterned Meadow Argus, they flee from cover to cover, only those too busy with the future seem to be still.

A brown falcon settles down on the flimsy branch of a dead tree, waits oh so briefly and then flies on - its body seems still as its wings corkscrew through the air. Pigeon flush and fly. The smell of sea air remains, the call of distant gulls and barely heard rush of the waves calls me back to the everybeach that lies just over there, just out of sight.

The road to Phillip Island was lightly garnished with dead foxes and rabbits - alien road kill. The Sat Nav seemed to have downloaded the maps for Bolivia or Mogadishu - “At the next junction turn left and drive away from your destination” . I turned it off. Each lamp post of the bridge over to the Island was topped with a Pacific Gull, each a picture of stillness. Pelicans sailed on the water under the bridge, each a picture of motion. Cape Woolami is just over the bridge. Turn left and park where you see the sea - I did not need the Sat Nav to tell me this thankfully. Most of the car spaces were full of surfers' cars, some old, some new, but most with bumper stickers and slogans. Young men called each other dude and swore with casual indifference. Time and a place boys, time and a place. It became apparent that I was in the middle of the World Knee Boarding Championships - I’m not making this up! A PA crackled with names and encouragement, but at least the amplified language does not veer into the Anglo Saxon. Wildness flies. I try to think positive man, but I fail.

The beach cuts down to the sea with an ankle turning steepness, the water is deep close in, safe to stranded in a single breath. I encourage the kids away from the water's edge. Brilliant, brutal, light reflects from the sand, the waves rush, each step breaks the crusted surface of the sand. The headland, away from the crowds, beckons. We walk past a dead seal pup and a penguin - both smell. I check the penguin for a flipper tag and think of the five fingered limb within. A deep time relative, with a shared history that diverged an unimaginable time ago, brought back together, here on this beach in the autumn sun. A cow fish, hard and dry, lies on its flank looking for all the world as if it has been carved from wood and sand, painted and left out to dry. The kids play in the sand and we make little progress - today is not the day for a walk.

A set of steps cut into a moss coated, slimy green soak brings us to the cliff top, where we sit and watch the surfers, eat chocolate and sip some water. Thick fleshy plants coat the ground, and snails coat the plants. Hidden between the bulked up leaves are hundreds of shells, mostly empty, some still home to a living snail. Any movement off the path is accompanied by a sharp, ugly, bursting of shells. Patches of bare ground, stamped with webbed foot prints mark the entrance to shearwater burrows. Most of the cliff top is a shearwater rookery, although there was little evidence of it other than the bare ground. It could easily be mistaken for a rabbit warren. What little evidence that could be seen were the bodies of dead chicks - scattered with surprising frequency among the plants. Gulls and ravens played catch as catch can with the corpses, a gruesome game of tug of war over bones, feet and broken wings. It was not a pretty sight.

A hawk flies over the cliff tops, distant and difficult, flushing most of the birds. It is mobbed and flies away, becoming a distant speck, as the clamour of alarm calls fades. We sit down for lunch, trying as best we can to avoid the snails. An Australian White Ibis, not looking the least Sacred, eyes our lunch, anticipating but not receiving. The day ticks over. Another beach adds its flavour to the everybeach mix. Under a clear blue sky, next to the rushing sea we walk back towards the car.

The continuing adventures of marine boy (and his dad)

2011-03-10T20:01:00.024+11:00

I’m not sure when it all started, when it became impossible to walk over a bridge without looking over the edge. Without looking for fish. I’m not sure when it all started, when it became impossible to walk along a pier without looking over the edge. Without looking for fish. Beach edge, pond side, creek bank, it’s always the same. The search for the fin flash of silver. Salmon in the Leven, flooding from Windermere, chub in the Somerset Brue chasing finger squeezed flakes of bread, surface swirls for floating crusts. Toad fish by Swan Bay Pier, bright sun surf whiting at Point Lonsdale. But more often than not I can’t put a name to the fish - mystery fish below a bridge or darting, shadow scared, in rock pools. Fin after fin breaking the surface of Broom harbor - maybe more fish than I have ever seen in one place - all without a name. Sometimes you see more than fish, a passing crab, the single swirl of an otter under a bridge, a water vole; but mostly it’s fish.

Standing on the bridge over Tidal River watching the fish dash and feed is like looking into another world. A world of buoyancy and flow. Winds have to be strong indeed to prevent the movement on land, but the flow of a river must be different. In the paper this week was a story of a platypus which had been found far out to sea, washed from the river by the floods, by the tyranny of water.

Seeing fish from the land or its built siblings is to see only half the creature. One tail flick and they are gone and we don’t see the fish, we see the fleeing fish. And that’s different to the fish itself. A zoo tiger is a caged tiger and that’s different from a tiger itself. To be able to see the fish as it is (or maybe see more of the fish as it is) you need to join it in the water. Recently I have started to have swimming lessons - not because I can’t swim, but because I want to swim better. For a few minutes in each of the lessons I feel like I am actually swimming, not just making the movements that prevent drowning. Each lesson those few minutes get longer. When you watch a fish dash away in fear you are only seeing the movements needed to avoid death. But when the fish don’t seem to mind you being there you see a different kind of swimming altogether. The range of movement approaches dance and the single minded swim sprint from fear to safety fades away.

Queenscliff has two piers, one where people walk and fish and the other for the pilot boat - the guide ship for the tortured waters of the Heads. A current flows between the piers and you can float on the surface, buoyed by a wetsuit, and just drift. The water is clear and the depth small, rock reefs appear and a few gentle fin kicks bring you closer. The reefs are like islands, flush with life in the seemingly barren sand. Some change comes about and sea grass starts to grow, a marine meadow. Small fish flicker between the strands of plant and, with eyes keener than mine, find food. They upend and kiss the plants or the seabed. Small clouds of sand break away from the sea bed as feeding occurs. Where the reefs have walls the edges are patrolled by wrasse, colorful dwellers on these mini drop-offs. Fish faces emerge from small caves and cracks, crabs wave claws, transparent shrimps, living glass, flick between safety and food. Purple specked brain anemones, soft and plastic, roll in the current. Lying on the surface is a strange Cartesian world of two dimensions. The buoyancy of the wetsuits keeps you pinned to the surface and diving is difficult. Once you stop trying you bob back to the surface. When you are trying to look at a fish or crab the journey to the surface seems rapid and disappointing. When you are at the end of your held breath the journey to the surface seems long and the rush of air distant.

Swimming in the rain was strange. You could hear the plink fizz of the drops in the water around you, you could see the bomb crater double splash of impact and rebound. Lying on the surface, at the boundary of two worlds, the rain only falls on your back. I could feel the impact but not the wetness. In the water, surrounded, the wet feels dry, feels normal, and you don’t feel the extra touch of the rain as it runs down your neck. The rain does not give the feeling of otherness it does when you are dry. Hardly surprising, but surprising anyway.

H has never snorkeled before, but looks relaxed as he drifts over fish, biscuit stars and elephant snails. He sees a squid, but it’s gone by the time I get there. Arms folded across his back he looks like a seal, albeit a seal with a mask and snorkel. He circles thumb and first finger to say he OK. You can see him smiling inside the face mask. A fin kick and he is off. Independent on a cool summer’s morning.

Under the pilot pier life abounds, the stanchions and piles rich with weed and sponges. Limpets cling in the splash zones, worms wave their fans. Around each wooden pile the currents have cut a trench, and here fish seem to gather. Wrasse, gobies, sliver fish, bronze fish, fish with glitter jewel colors. Small fish, large fish, larger fish ghosting in the background. The trip ends and we walk heavy footed along the beach. Shark eggs, abalone shells, dead-men’s fingers, storm washed beach finds in the rain. Sandy feet, and tired legs. We go in search of lunch.

Summer comes to an end, autumn beckons. Before the water chills we head to Portsea for another swim. I’d been here before, and was spreading words of confidence and encouragement to H. The journey down was punctuated with accounts of some of the more ridiculous world records that people have gained. Most needles in the head, most straws in the mouth, most time wasted sticking needles in your head - that sort of thing. The water around Portsea pier was as clear as clear can be, but there was still a kind of veil drawn over what you could see. The glitter splash of small fish hardens the surface, colours shift and the back swish of waves pulls at the sand. Nets are cast for crabs, lured in by chicken frames. Buckets full of crabs line the pier edge, all legs and claws, destined for the pot.

We walk backwards into the water, facing the land, avoiding the embarrassment of a fin fall. Within minutes we are drifting over seaweed gardens, green and mobile. It feels like you are drifting over a forest canopy, like some giant bird. This time a waterproof camera hangs from my wrist, but I soon find out how hard it is to use. I’m moving, the fish and plants are moving and the sunlight blanks out the screen. Point. Click. Hope. Click again. Pheasant shells are gathered from the sea bed, disturbing the sleep of snails. Old Wives - a classically stripy fish - hover by the rock edge. We are guided into deeper water by the liquid flowing edge of a rock band. When you dive down, you can peek into the dark under shelf of the rock edge. Secret places, with hidden things. If you try to show anybody you can never find them again, as if seeing them causes them to disappear, some form of Schrödinger’s fish. It might be there, but then again.

Under the pier the rush of the water is stronger, funnelled by the wood work and the shape of the shore. Photographs are even harder to take. I play chasey with a crab, round and round a pillar pole. Eight legs are much better than a floating man, hindered by fins, wet suit and millions of years of evolutionary history between me and my marine past. Bright coloured sponge gardens, lemons and oranges, coat the poles. The plants wave, frantic Mexican waves, back and forth, back and forth.

A weedy sea dragon drifts out on the under pier gloom and despite my best efforts eludes being photographed. In the end I stop trying and just watch - not wanting to be prevented from just looking by the desire to take a photograph. This decision is made easier as the battery goes flat, and the camera becomes nothing more than bling.

Sitting in the darkness under the pier, looking out into the sparkling, sun bright water, feels like staring into the emptiness of space. The millions of little cells catching the light in green sparkles, I breathe in what they produce and wonder at the connection of it all. Tiny plants, me and H, the sea dragon, all on a tiny blue planet, a water world, spinning through space.

Here, in the last week of summer, I’m glad I can pay attention, I glad I’m swimming with H and showing him things you don’t always see.

A marine boy (and his dad) in a water world, with no need for fairy tales to explain what we see, and a sense that showing your kids the world as it really is has to be the most important job in the world.

Long Distance Travel

2011-02-26T20:42:00.025+11:00

Trying to catch shore birds is a matter of hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait. Setting the net needs to be done as quickly as possible, camouflaged, and attached to the cannons and then left. Sometimes the birds need to be encouraged to move into the catching area - twinkled as we call it. But for the most part it’s just a matter of sitting and waiting, sipping bitter flask coffee. The crackle of radio messages - “25 birds in the catching area”, “What just put the birds up?” “Peregrine”, “Arm” “three, two, one - fire”.

All hell breaks loose when the small red button on the firing box is finally pushed. Such a small button, such a lot of action. Birders, normally a sedate (some would say sedated) and reserved lot, now in the guise of banders, sprint for the net. Most put in an Olympic A qualifying time, many pull muscles, some lose their shoes, some fall and lose their dignity. A few years ago I broke a toe dashing towards a net of damp birds, but only found out about it a few hours later, after the birds had been processed and when the excitement levels had fallen. It really was rather painful, but for the best part of two hours I’d failed to notice.

The birds in the net are nonplussed to say the least and are telling us so with every call, squawk and whistle that they know. A net full of birds - many, many birds - is no place for the faint of heart. Orders, not requests are given, and the prime, the only, concern is for the birds. If you are likely to take offence at being told to move faster, pull harder or to stop gauping, then this is no place for you. The birds come first and ego a distant second. Standing on the net is a possible death sentence for the birds, and a certain one for you. There are few certainties in life, but not standing on the net is one of them. A dry catch is preferable, but a wet one is much more common and much more work. On some catches it pays not to look at what you are kneeling in as you extract the birds. Once extracted from the net the birds are placed into small, dark keeping cages where they wait with surprising calm.

To see the faces of people who have never held a wild bird before is to see something close to a childlike happiness in many adults. A kind of happiness that seems to grow from the wonder of what they are actually doing down here by the sea, here in the mud and sand. A kind of happiness that grows from the nearly miraculous stories that these birds have carried with them from far, far away. Smiles widen as Knot, Godwits and Stints are passed from the hands of the extractors to the “runners” moving the birds to the cages. The runners hold the larger birds with a kind of surprised reverence. They offer the birds to the keeping cages with the same look of concentration I saw on the faces of the people who were running communion when I was forced to sit through endless Chapel services - an unbeliever in the pews. But these birds have not undergone any form of transubstantiation; they were wild at the start and remain wild to the end. If there is a truth here, it’s that while you can hold a wild thing in your hands, you will never know the true wildness it knows. There may well be salvation in wildness, but you can’t find it if you hold things captive.

Once the blood pressure of both banders and birds has returned to the normal range, the next stage begins - processing. Here the birds are measured, weighed, banded and in this case flagged. A range of biometric measurements are taken - bill length, combined head bill length, wing length (but not if the outer primaries are moulting), weight - these are all taken and logged. The state of the feathers is minutely scrutinised to age the bird. A small metal band (ring in the UK) is put on the left leg and an orange “leg flag” on the right. Orange means SE Australia - see a bird with an orange flag and it could have passed through my hands. Retraps, or controls, always cause excitement, but often they are recently banded birds. In many ways this is reassuring, as it means the birds quickly recover from being handled. In fact it always surprises me how many flagged birds you can still see, feeding on the tide’s edge or washing their feathers, just meters from where we are processing their flock mates.

But if the looks on the faces of the people who have never held a bird are remarkable, then the stories that the weighing, measuring and retrapping reveal are doubly so. The migration of birds must have always played a part in the world of humans. Spring returns and autumn departures would have marked changes from famine to feast, from cold to warm. Migration was nature as augury. Even today this aspect may not be lost: people still write to the Times on hearing the first CXuckoo, Ted Hughes still sees the return of spring Swifts as a sign that the “world is still working“. Cranes. Geese. Winter Thrushes. Humming birds. They all come and go and we seek to know why. People have always invented stories to explain where the birds go. Gilbert White, whose book started all of this, thought that Swifts and Swallows hibernated in the mud at the bottom of ponds, but he was wrong. What we were doing on the beach, was helping resolve the truth of the matter.

These birds spend their non-breeding time in Australia, and breed in the northern hemisphere - they are like sun seeking tourists, maximising the daylight. Of course the language of such travel is difficult; these birds are not over wintering in Australia. It can be 40oC, there can be weeks without rain, so this hardly counts as winter - having said that what we have just been through in Australia hardly counts as a summer either.

Now these birds undertake a north south journey of staggering endurance and distance. The birds that come to SE Australia breed in Alaska - which in terms of Melbourne to Anchorage is over 12,400 km away from the beach where we caught them! Before they do this journey many immature birds will have gone on a relatively short “day trip” across the Tasman Sea to New Zealand - a mere 2600 km! These journeys are completed by a bird with a mass of no more than 600g for a large female. This is the same mass as a couple of large apples, less than a family sized pizza, or 10 mars bars! And yet they fly to Alaska. Now this would be remarkable enough if they did it in a series of short hops and skips - a little bit here and a little bit there. But no, that’s not good enough for our Godwits. They fly from Australia to the South China Sea more or less in one go, then feed up again before heading for Alaska. Impressed yet? Well I hope you’re sat down. On the return journey they fly over the Pacific in one go - all 10,000 km and 8 or 9 days of it. 70-80 km an hour for hour after hour after hour. It’s the longest known non-stop migration flight of any bird. If you take the round trip to be 20,000 km our oldest know bird (24 years old) has flown 480,000 km just on migration. This does not include the flights when it pops down to the shops for food or has to fly away up the beach because it’s been disturbed by banders! Now 480,000 km is more than the distance between the Moon and the Earth. I’m running out of comparisons here - but I need you to be impressed! And on a surprisingly chill January morning I sat on a beach in Australia and weighed and measured one of the greatest travellers that evolution has produced, knowing that in a few months it would be off north again. Pulled by instinct and the spin of the Earth through space.

Of course the birds come to Australia to fatten up, to put on condition to allow them to breed the next year. So they feed on shrimps, beach worms and such like and store the Australian sunlight energy that has passed along the food chains and take it back to Alaska, via China. I suppose it’s just another form of mineral export.

You very quickly begin to tell the bigger females from the males - they are a real handful and their beaks can be longer than the whole head and beaks of the males. Rather annoyingly the female’s head and beak length can be longer than the callipers we use to measure them with as well - these are not small birds. They are weighted by being placed in a plastic tube and after being banded and flagged are released into the wind, back down to the waves where they wash and start to feed. It’s a remarkable feeling knowing that when we are in our coldest months, these birds will be in the far north with hour after hour of sunlight in each day, and only instinct to bring them back to this beach.

As we walk away from the beach a kind of calm settles; the Godwits, all legs and stick thin beaks, the plump and dumpy Knot and flighty Stint, scatter and regather at the water’s edge. Joggers pound along the firming sand, dogs run and sniff. The normality of an Australian beach morning returns, with only scuffed sand and a few orange tagged birds to show that we were there. If, on your journeys around the world you happen to meet a Godwit with VJ on its leg, say hello, wish it good luck, and then let me know.

A short walk at Wilsons Prom - on 2,6,8 and no legs at all.

2011-02-12T17:50:00.033+11:00

Another return trip to Wilson’s Promontory, this time with the kids in tow. The camp sites are busy with families packing up and wondering how they ever managed to get all their stuff in the car last time. Yellow patches of sun-starved grass mark the tents’ departure, and sun browned teenagers wave goodbye to holiday romances. But as ever, the paths away from Tidal River are not crowded, and soon we only hear the crunch of feet on gravel paths. Well, the crunch of gravel and the occasional question about whether we are there yet!

A Varied Sword-grass Brown butterfly lands in the bushes, and one of the few groups of walkers we see all day pass it by without lifting their heads. They pass between lens and butterfly and I’m tempted to photograph the side of the walker’s head - but I don’t bother. I doubt they would have noticed anyway. A flighty Yellow Admiral refuses to sit still, and a Common Brown rests briefly on the sandy bank. Its tongue unzips and probes the ground, searching for minerals. After a few minutes we move on.

A cry of “snake!” rends the air and both kids chatter with a combination of excitement and surprise. Slithering across the path is a dark looking snake, with just the hint of pale stripes on the sides - I think it’s the dark form of a Tiger Snake. These snakes have a reputation for being aggressive, but this one just passes before us, tongue tasting the air. The apparent effortlessness of their limbless movement is always fascinating and somehow strange. We seem to privilege legs over other forms of movement, things that gallop or vault being better than things that crawl and certainly better that things that slither. But we don’t want too many legs, six is a push and eight far too many! Head up and alert, the snake moves around and under fallen branches and dead leaves. If it knows we are watching it does not seem to care, moving as does it with slow, deliberate care. Hunting as it moves. Within a few meters it seems to disappear, hidden under the leaf fall branch junk that lies under the scrub. I am constantly being told “don’t put your hands where you can’t see them” - and this disappearing snake explains why. Contrary to popular rumour Australia is not awash with snakes, but it pays to take care! I like the fact that the kids showed a combination of both surprise and excitement at the snake - it was their first one in the wild. No need to be scared, every need to be careful, look, but don’t touch.

Ahead the path-side vegetation opens to show a view back across Norman Bay, a view that would make any walk worthwhile. The kids prefer the jelly snakes and a drink. As we move up the hill the Tea Tree suddenly thins and we move into a form of coastal heath-land. Looking back it seems that a razor line has been slashed across the landscape, one place here and another there, a demarcation in conditions that I can’t see, but the plants detect and respond to. And so do the animals. This divide does not seem to mark the raggle taggle edge of some past fire, nor the patch by patch regrowth from windblown storm damage.

Large spider webs hang across the bushes, orbs with a hunter sitting in the middle of a sky-net of their own weaving. The webs often stretch over a number a meters and the spiders are large enough to catch even the most jaded attention. Some seem to be Garden Orb Weavers, with red legs and swollen bodies. Others have very different colours, but seem to be the same species. As you approach their webs they dash with surprising speed to the sanctuary of a leaf. I don’t think I’ve ever had to stalk spiders before, but here, in the tangled heath, one misplaced foot sends them dashing away. Seeing the spiders sat in the centre of the orb in the full light of day seems strange, contrary to the published wisdom that says they take their webs down at the end of each night. We watch a grasshopper blast into a web, the spider moves, but too late as the prey escapes, leaving behind a huge hole in the web. Spider renovations will be in order.

Robber flies and dragonflies dash around the hill top that is our aim and our lunch spot stop. People express surprise at seeing my kids at the top of the hill, as if gentle uphill walking would be beyond them. The March flies are slow and clumsy, and swatting them rather than waving them away damages my conservationist credentials. I wonder why the robbers and dragons are not feasting. Slackers.

Down from the hill top the path is a light strip of sand, where bull ants, with ferocious intent, and glinting blue wasps, seek food. The plants change again and again. Grass trees, scrubby looking gums, line the path. Smooth in one direction and sharply rough in the other, grass tree leaves conceal many things. Glossy brown beetles pass the day, hidden and feeding, thornbills flash past and on the high, dead, flower stalks New Holland Honeyeaters call. In the shelter of a tree a Hyacinth orchid stands tall with a naked stem and purple flowers. It’s a single streak of colour in the pale greys and greens of the woodland floor. In an instance the cicadas start to call - loud and shrill. How do they all start at once? Is this another signal that things respond to that I can’t sense? How much time would you have to spend here before you could tune into the calls and signals that dominate the lives of birds and insects? Would it ever be possible? Seasonal change still takes me by surprise, so what chance is there to feel the changes that happen second by second, hour by hour?

We stop again - on such days there is no need to hurry, it’s about having a good time, it’s not about making good time. Today there is no need to be haunted by the clock, bothered by the tick tock of modern time. Stop when you feel like it, drink when you need it. Under a rock face that is like a frozen wave of stone we watch the dragonflies and enjoy the shade. A group of walkers, moving up the hill, heads and eyes down seem not to notice us and are surprised when we say hello. As we pass around the back of the hill the sea comes back into view, and the distant specks of surfers and swimmers punctuate the waves.

The unwelcome roar of motorbikes drifts up from the road and we know we are on the final stage of our circular walk, but more spiders cause us to move with a studied slowness. The huge webs give the place a feel of autumn, but that can’t be right, it’s still summer. And the next day any illusion of autumn melts in the 40o heat. Seat belt buckles, baked in the car, are too hot to touch and you drive with finger tip control for fear of burning your hands; it feels like your cameras are melting. A jewelled green beetle walks on unsteady feet across the path and sits on excited hands for its photo call.

But this day has one more surprise left. As we walk along the edge fringing the swamp that follows Tidal River I start to see spots before my eyes, well spots under a bush if the truth be told. These require closer attention. On a network of silken threads, starting from a single point and spreading down like an inverted parachute, hang dozens, maybe hundreds of spiders and their parcelled victims. Closer inspection shows the spiders to be Jewel Spiders, brightly coloured, triangular shapes that stay still even when you poke them with a finger. The woven colony spreads for 10 - 15 meters under the bushes. It’s a good way to end the walk, and I know I would have missed them if our eyes had been down, walking fast and not paying attention.

At the waters edge (Part 2)

2011-01-27T21:14:00.029+11:00

Down by the lighthouse, where the turning of the tide exposes rocks and weed, birds gather to look for food, to loaf about and to squabble over finds and food. Pacific Gulls, huge, muscular looking birds stand guard over fish frames and other delights. These gulls have the largest beak of any gull, and it looks a fearsome weapon, even through the protection of binoculars. One bird seems to have surprising difficulty with a toad fish, probably discarded by a fisherman. Even the huge beak seems not to be able to cut through the tough outer skin, and eventually the bird takes flight bearing its fishy find with it. Seaweed coats the rocks with tiny balls that look and feel like slimy, rubber marbles, each footstep is risky, and jumping out of the question.

I pick my way to the sea’s edge and look south towards distant Antarctica. I turn around and look north, towards even more distant Cape York in Queensland, and I am struck by the size of this continent island and the scale of the floods. The water rushes out of Port Phillip Bay bearing a brown tinge, brought by the rain, and the colour stretches out to sea. It’s still visible to the horizon, here on the last stretch of water before the Southern Ocean circles the globe. Just how much rain have we had?

Down at the water’s edge, where careful feet become even more cautious, are flocks of Red Necked Stint. Tiny birds, mouse-like really. At least one has an orange flag on its leg, showing that it has been banded on the coast of Victoria. There is a possibility (albeit a remote one) that I banded it! I still find it remarkable that these tiny birds - each one weights about 25g - can fly from their breeding grounds in the northern hemisphere to the south coast of Australia every year. When you hold them in your hands you can feel their hearts beating, frantic, tiny, like a failed attempt to tickle your palm. But they still fly the thousands of kilometres each year, driven by genetics, the turn of the Earth and the food they glean from the water’s edge.

The rain had swollen the Barwon and it rushed with unusual haste towards the sea. The upper reaches seem to have covered mud banks and rich feeding grounds that would have normally held flocks of waders. In search of food they head for the river mouth. This is not really a peaceful place. A new bridge is being built, with the clatter bang of machines and building. Joggers pound along the beach, reach the bridge, turn and come back, fisherman cast hopeful baits into the swollen river. And in the midst of this is a flock of about 100 Bar Tailed Godwits. They probe the sea edge or most uncharacteristically wander about on the beach. Normally these birds are very nervous, and getting within binocular range is a challenge. Here they were far more accommodating. They moved over the beach, looking for all the world like a flock of domestic birds, slightly agitated but tolerant of human contact. At the water’s edge were more Red Necked Stint and a small flock of Knot. They flashed about, slightly spooked by the passing people, but calm enough. A good game with stint is to try to find one that stands still - so far I have failed to find one.

Overhead terns call - and the harsher bark of a Caspian Tern makes me look up. These are a large and impressive bird, with an equally large and impressive red beak. I once heard them described as “large with a very large carrot stuck on their face” - in reality the phrase used to describe the size of the carrot was a little more Anglo Saxon than I have quoted, but you get the picture. The Crested Terns were as obliging as ever as they gathered with this year’s young, their mottled feathers in contrast to the smart grey and black of the adult. Then I noticed a much smaller tern, with a black beak and legs. Wow! A Common Tern, which despite its name is not really common here at all. This is the first time in a long time when the habitual scan through a flock of terns or gulls reveals anything out of the ordinary. The Caspians land on the beach and look huge. Another set of surprises from a place I thought I knew.

The sun was just brightening the morning sky and the full moon was still bright enough to cast soft shadows. There is something special about early mornings, a sense of opening. I was off to the beach, and I hoped it would be empty and was. Willie Wagtails argue on the roof of a beach house and Blue Wrens call. The sunrise is wonderful, but my cameras are on the kitchen table. Oops. The light slices through gaps in the clouds and plays hide and seek across the landscape. A successful Gannet, with a silver fish in its beak, flies past an unsuccessful fisherman. For a moment a pod of Dolphins break the surface of the bay, but they dash off and I don’t see them again. The beach traffic begins to build, with dog walkers and joggers. I head home.

The beach was beginning to fill with families, mums, dads and kids. The young learn from the old, and wisdom is passed on. A group of Pied Oystercatchers, possibly even a family, probe in the wave wash. One of the adults has coloured leg bands and a metal ring. He is a regular on the beach. One of the birds with him is a juvenile, with a dull beak rather than the adult’s flame red. Nice to see an example where the teenagers are not more outlandish than the adults. Beach worms are pulled, ever so gently, from the sand. Pull too hard and they snap, not hard enough and they don’t come out at all. I wonder how many times the juvenile snaps the worm before the task is mastered?

That night I am awoken by the calls of Yellow Tailed Black Cockatoos. I have never heard them at night before and I imagine what must have caused them to move from their roost at night. A fox? Humans? The rain? The next day they flap overhead as we have morning tea. They seem to fly in formation, and call as they go. Down on the beach more dragonflies flash past.

I have been here before, but the place still surprises me. Thankfully.

At the waters edge (part 1)

2011-01-26T21:49:00.030+11:00

I was back at Point Lonsdale, west of Melbourne, on the Bellarine Peninsula, my normal summer haunt. I have probably spent more nights in this house than anywhere that I don’t actually call home. I was beginning to wonder what I would see that was new, or at least different. There had been rain, not as much as further north where floods had washed away homes, destroyed towns and lives in a way that has not been seen before, but there was enough to alter plans. A low pressure sitting to the south of Victoria pulled warm, moist tropical air from monsoonal far north Australia, and it rained and rained and rained. Warm rain, steady rain, unfamiliar rain. In such weather you just get on with it because you are on holiday.

(I was aware at the time and remain painfully aware that the rain I am talking about was robbing people of all they had - and I had the same unreal feeling as during the recent bush fires - “How can this be?” “How can this be happening here?” To complain of spoiled beach days or altered plans would be to show a degree of insensitivity way, way below crassness. So, with that in mind, I will continue).

When it stopped raining the light was soft and full in the clear air, and in the evenings it took on a golden glow. Cloud and sun produced rainbows and ships sailed in search of the pot of gold.

Everything seemed to have responded to the rain that had fallen over the last months. Paddocks that have been dust bowls and dams that have always been dry shone with life. When it stopped raining there were more dragonflies than I ever remember seeing before. In the rain there were none. Standing on the beach looking out to sea, small dots would turn into dragonflies as they shot across the water, some flew in tandem, most shot past without being identified. In the garden crisp Painted Ladies flash from flower to flower, and tiny blue butterflies flick up from hiding places in the grass. Painted Ladies seem to have followed me everywhere this summer - and my plan to start being able to name these insects has progressed, but now stalled.

On the boat ramps fishermen still fish, waterproofed by optimism. They fillet salmon, whiting and wrasse. Birds gather for the scraps flicked from the boats. A juvenile Little Pied Cormorant sits low in the water; with dense bones and heavy feathers this is a bird where flying has been swapped for swimming. In the shallow waters near the jetties and ramps it dives under the water in search of food. It tucks its wings in close and tight and kicks with its feet. Pelicans gather as well. Close up they seem comical and ungainly as they fight for a speck of fish. These birds are here day after day, predictable. As is the huge Sting-Ray that glides around the harbour, also looking for fish.

A strange insect crawls across the fly wire of the door. I had not seen anything like this before. Stick insect? Grasshopper? Neither? It turns out to be a Twig-Mimicking Katydid , a strange creature which feeds on the pollen and nectar of flowers, but rather delightfully does not damage the flowers in the process. So it is a vegetarian and a pacifist! When it is not walking up fly wire or eating pollen it spends its time pretending to be a stick - it lies length ways along a real stick, tucks its long legs by its side and its longer antennae out in front and relies on camouflage. The remarkable spiky extension of its body ends up looking like a broken twig, or a leaf stalk. You have to assume this works really rather well, because it must be expensive to build. You have to wonder at the fine calculations the selective powers of evolution have applied to this animal. The energy and material used to build that spike could produce a lot of eggs.

Later when I went to dump some vegetable scraps in the compost bin I found an abandoned bee’s nest slicked on to the rim of the bin. The bees were long gone, thankfully, but the combs were still in place. That evening I walked into the bathroom and was greeted by a scorpion! Not a large one, but they don’t need to be large to grab your attention. After some deft work with a sheet of paper and a glass I had it in captivity. In did not seem to be all that well, which may not have been a bad thing. After the kids oohed and aahed about it I let it go in the garden. I think it was a Black Rock Scorpion, but the fact that it was a scorpion was good enough for me. It had you think twice about padding barefoot to the bathroom at night. Maybe this place was still capable of a few surprises.

In the pouring rain I go bird watching and find a Pelican seeming to take a drink. It was stood there with its beak wide open and pointing at the sky - every minute or so it would shake its head from side to side, pause and then point its open gaping beak skyward again. It could have been trying to wash something out of its mouth, but if that was the case, why not use sea water?

White Fronted Chats display called from bush tops and a passing white butterfly came to the end of its life. Striated Heath Wrens - with a cocked tail and a loud voice - also called from the bushes. In between the rain Welcome Swallows flash past and drink from the standing pools of water, they land on car mirrors, windscreen wipers and wire fences. At times the air is full of swallows, and then they disappear for no reason I can discern. Silver Gulls wash in the puddles. Crested Terns, with buoyant, airy wing beats hunt for bait fish and argue amongst themselves. Royal Spoonbills preen in the sunshine between showers. As I leave it starts raining again. It carries on raining.

to be continued .......

First Day of Summer - Tales of the Riverbank

2011-01-07T21:30:00.025+11:00

There was no snow this time, but there were butterflies and buttercups. There were far less people, but those who were there seemed intent on making enough noise to make up for the lack of crowds. Why do some people feel the need to have a good shout the moment that they emerge from their car? Does the sudden rush of space scare them? Have they had the radio turned up so loud that they can only communicate by bellowing? Who knows.

It was strange to find that the footpath we had walked along to the summit of Mount Donna Buang in the winter was in fact a road, and that the car parks that had been flowing with liquid mud were now silent and empty. In the equally deserted BBQ shelter I found out that Mount Donna Buang is higher than anywhere in the UK outside of Scotland. I recently read a few lines to the effect that being the highest point in Britain is a bit like being the longest hole on a mini golf course. This is of course not a flattering assessment, but it was probably written by somebody who had spent six months in England and had never left London. I can’t help but wonder why some people spend so much time sniping about the UK and then so much money travelling there. But I need to stop before my national hackles rise too far, or I mention the cricket.

Lizards rattled through the dry leaves, ran from shadows and rushed back into the sun when the coast was clear. On the stones that edged the car park larger lizards basked in the sun and moved with surprising speed towards wayward flies and passing butterflies. And there were plenty of both about. The bush-fly is clearly Australia’s most visible wildlife icon, but it’s also the least appreciated, although not by hungry lizards.

The hill top was speckled with butterflies, and from underfoot ants swarmed and grasshoppers hopped. In other parts of the state the grasshoppers swarmed and became locusts, but not here, not today. Many of the butterflies seemed to be Large Whites - Cabbage Whites if you want - and they are not native, but once you could filter out their presence, other more interesting ones could be found. Australian Painted Ladies - which sounds like a group that would work in adult entertainment - glided and flicked from flower to flower. They seemed crisper, newer, than the ones in the garden at home, and I suppose they were. I assume that the towering summit of MDB is cooler that my garden, so the butterflies would have emerged later, and be younger than mine. Larger butterflies also moved among the flowers, Macleay's swallow tails, with beautiful pale green patches under the wings and an annoying habit of always beating their wings flying or not. Perched on flowers, moving between flowers, fighting with rivals, were all done under frenetic wing beats. They only glided when high above the ground, circling the lower branches of trees. They were hard to frame, and harder to photograph.

At least in Victoria it has stopped raining. Queensland is underwater, but Victoria is drying out. Everywhere you look it is greener than I have seen. In places the grass is waist high, the gullies are damp and streams that were dried isolated pools in the last few years are now running and clear.

The slope down from the summit was bright with buttercups - and more butterflies. The flowers were probably a weed, but they still shone in the sunlight. I sat in the long grass and waited, but little happened. Bees buzzed, grasshoppers and crickets called their leggy song, bird calls drifted from the woodland. Something dawned on me. Under a clear blue Australian sky - so large, so huge - it felt like I was in the afternoon of the first day of summer. As a kid there was a clear marker that summer had begun. Summer always started on the 16th June. This was a family birthday, but that was not the reason - we weren’t that sort of family. The 16th June was the first day of summer because you could start fishing again - and specifically you would be fishing for tench. On popular waters people would sit in rows, chasing this green, compact, muscular fish. Within weeks, sometimes days, it was clear that the summer was beginning to fade, and you would move on to other species. The rows of red topped floats would thin with the crowds, and you knew that more peaceful times were ahead - and I think that the fish knew too.

Down the hill from the summit you can walk into a forest gully, rich with tree ferns and moss. Once you were on the forest floor you could hear, but not see, water. If you peered round trees, or stood on the rails of a viewing platform, you could just glimpse the stream. It was a secret little place, full of small noises and delight.

It was a real contrast to the river - the Yarra - that flows through Warburton. Here the water was open to view and not hidden at all. Bread fat ducks gather at the water’s edge and children splash and swim. In the forest the water was hidden and the life was on display, here it was the other way around. You had to stand still and let the life come to you as the water flowed past. Most of the life had four wings rather than two; I waited for the flash of a kingfisher, but I waited in vain. But a streak of blue did pass by, a large dragon fly - possibly a Whitewater Rockmaster - landed on a rock near the middle of the water. It ignored me as it ignored all the other noise and haste around it. It cleaned its large eyes and seemed to wait. Then it was off, only to be replaced by another, and then another. The rock was some form of dragonfly way station, a stop on a journey up river.

These dragons are hard to name - with many, many dozens of possibilities - I don’t think I ever realised how few different species there actually were in the UK until I came to Australia with its diversity and size. Two large “dragonflies” land on the same waterside plant at the same time - they eye each other off and both move aside. One holds its wings in an X shape - not along its back like many damsel flies, or straight out like their larger dragon cousins. The X wing turns out to be a Flat Wing, a large damsel fly. Rare insects of this type are found in this area, but this is probably not one of them. Rare things don’t turn up every day.

But on this day a rare thing did show its face - the first day of summer, spent on the tops of hills and the banks of rivers. Who could ask for more?

Both side of the bay.

2010-12-29T21:53:00.037+11:00

Port Phillip Bay sits below Melbourne like the head of a badly battered tadpole. The Yarra - the tadpole’s tail - stretches up into the hills to the north.

The bay itself is shallow and in its waters hides the ghost of Yarra’s course, from when the world was colder and the sea was lower. The bay is held in the arms of two peninsulas - the Mornington to the east and the Bellarine to the west. Each is visible from the other, and each is different from the other, and in between is the water, constantly shifting but seemingly permanent. But in reality it is a newcomer, a flooded plain from the end of the last ice age. And as the world warms it will grow larger and come knocking on peoples doors, an unwelcome guest and the first foot of a startling new year.

Standing on the edge of a great ocean can feel like looking at the edge of the world, the grey seasky and the waves and maybe the curve of the Earth. But the Bay is not this big, it lacks the vast scale of the ocean and you can always see parts of land in the distance, lighthouses, and the toothpick spikes of Melbourne’s CBD. At night those tall towers glitter like modern lighthouses, but you have to wonder why all the lights are left on. As the city has spread out around the arms of the bay, with its street plans looking like some form of cheap tattoo, the mystery of time and tide has been brought closer to the city.

On the beach at St. Kilda, once a small village, now a bayside suburb, jellyfish were washed up on the beach, causing alarm to young children, concern to strolling coffee drinkers and not a jot of interest to the sleeping bodies of last night’s party folk, blurred and recovering at the water’s edge.

While the bay may not have the edge of the world view of the Pacific it really is the edge of our world. The coming and going of the tide makes all coastal edges vague and imprecise, places where maps are even more uncertain than normal. Coastal maps are at best an approximation and are often out of date the moment they are drawn. The coast marks the boundary between our air world and the water world that is elsewhere. The silver pull of the moon changes the water’s edge hour by hour, sometimes sea, sometimes land and often something in between. We are suited to that land, but at sea we need the help of our technology to survive. It’s no real surprise that the development of our civilisation can be mapped on to the exploration of the world’s oceans, and that the Sea of Tranquillity, which is not a sea at all, is as far as we have been.

To pass from the water’s edge and out on to the water itself is always a journey, where physics is needed and it seems that the rules of motion change. The journey from land to sea always holds the attention, and even on short trips you will find people just standing and watching, peering out over the ship side rails and into the water. This may be bring rewards, but it seems to be worthwhile just in itself.

The ferry from Queenscliff to Sorrento ploughs backwards and forwards across the bay, on the hour, every hour of daylight. Forty minutes of travel, twenty minutes to load and unload and then back to the other side, passing its twin mid-journey. Sometimes the ferries are followed by bay dolphins, recently identified as a new species, playing in the wake. Surfing the standing wave they follow the boat, delighting the rail leaners and leaving as suddenly as they arrived, possible bored, possible getting to where they needed to go using the public transport provided by the day trippers. Who knows?

An industry has built up around watching the dolphins, with boats from both sides of the bay searching for them. Hundreds of people, me included, invest time and money trying to see these beautiful animals, and seem delighted when they find them and devastated when they don’t. But as ever, it is the surprise encounter, the un-planned visit that holds the highest reward; the wake surfers or the encounters while fishing. Neither side of the bay has a monopoly on these animals, but they do seem to crop up more often on the Mornington side.

Dolphins have a huge public appeal and whoever manages their PR is doing a mighty fine job, for the details of their private life are as sordid as a typical footballers, with sex and coercion to the fore, but fewer drugs. The real life of a dolphin is very far from the picture shown in Flipper! But people still flock to see them - seeking, and often finding, a connection between them and the wild they would not find elsewhere - and no matter that the real life details of the animal they have come to see are something of a state secret. People wax lyrical about the experience, and ignore the birds overhead. Our guide talks of science and the need for conservation, then about the power of homeopathy. Contradictory ideas in the same mind - quite impressive really. And all around us the dolphins swim. For all my cynicism about this, there is no doubting the appeal of these animals. I just wish we could wash the candy coat away, and know them as they really are, not as we want them to be.
I spent a morning weaving between the moored boats over on the Mornington side, under steep cliffs capped with the expansive houses of the rich - architect designed, but often ugly none the less. Some had pulley railways from the cliff edge to the beach below, to save the weary legs that 100 meter climb at the end of the day - or if the rumours are correct, to deliver cold wine and strawberries to the beach at lunch time. The waves lap at the base of the cliffs and at the hulls of long moored boats, with a green strip of fouling underneath and bird lime on top.

The bright yellow sea kayak was a great toy, and brought back none of the horrors of kayaks from past years - instability, paddling in circles, and forced capsizes in the name of safety. Out past the wading depth from the shore's edge you felt like you were really in the bay, even if the shore was never that far away. At sea-level the gannets that flashed overhead seemed even bigger than normal, the terns floated past and gulls laboured on heavier wings. Cormorants hunted around the piers, cursed by the fishermen, but surely a sign that there were fish to be had. Silver ghost flashes of fish dart through the shallows, and all eyes scan for dolphins. Down the coast we passed the old quarantine station where the ill and the dying were prevented from coming ashore for fear of infection. This was a place of isolation, where the least fortunate were held to die, or prove their health. And it seemed strange that now many of the cliffs were capped by the houses of the very rich, seeking isolation from the less fortunate, medical quarantine one year, social quarantine next. Some people seemed interested in these mega houses, but I could not help but wonder where they will be when the cliffs are undercut and waves wave at the back door? Will the sanctuary of the rich become the high hills and the coast become, once more, the home of the disposed, the ill and the uninsurable? Will they still have the cliff edge railways? Will they still have the boats bobbing at anchor, bought to impress but rarely to sail.

When you paddle on the sea, with each blade stroke leaving its own little gyre in the water, it becomes very clear that much of the water is rather empty of visible life. Pop a drop under the microscope and it may be a different story, but to the human eye it looks empty. But then you encounter small hot spots where life is abundant and visible. Two of these places on the bay do not glory in politically correct names - The Pope's Eye and Chinaman’s Hat. Both are artificial and both are a Mecca for life - although mixing the Pope and Mecca is probably asking for trouble.

The Pope's Eye is a C shaped reef that has been built up by the addition of large stones - the plan was to use it for a gun turret, but technology overtook the need and shore based weapons were trained on the bay instead. Now it has abundant life, both above and below the water. Fish I can’t name swim past and Gannets preen and tend their young on the rocks. For all its wonder, it still has the unmistakable smell of a sea bird colony! On the platform known as the Chinaman’s Hat, Fur Seals loaf around, waiting for next year. These fur seals are bachelors or the elderly, without out a mate this year and resting up for one more roll of the breeding dice. They slide into the water and swim beside us - I hesitate to say they swim with us because we can have no idea of motivation. But whatever the cause they make even the best swimmers look leaden and slow.

But once you get into the water you start to see the real other side of the bay - not defined by the geography of east and west, but by the vertical split of above and below. I have recently heard that some computer games are “immersive”. Well, that may be the case, but swimming underwater really is. With little to hear but the rasping of your own breath in the snorkel you have a greater sense of your own land locked abilities than ever before. In the afternoon, after the sea kayak paddle, I snorkelled around the pier at Portsea. Wrapped in a buoyant and warm suit you could drift over the surface and gaze down at the sea bed. With the help of a lead belt, you could dive down and briefly investigate the life around you. But buoyancy and the need to breath always won, and I soon popped back to the surface, a marine Jeremy Fisher, but not, thankfully, pursued by a trout. A rock ledge weaves in a slow 'S' out from the shore, and the life follows it. Wrasse and dozens of other fish with names I don’t know drift past and disappear with the flick of their tails. A Puffer-fish shows its inflated displeasure, and my own regret at not having a camera grows. Focussed on the sea bed, I find myself surrounded by small surface fish and looking up I swear in surprise, a living patch of silver that seems to have solidified the currents of the water. I have heard the sea called “permanence in motion”, and as the fish currents flow over me, I know what it means. First one way, then another, oblivious to my presence, never ending, never ceasing.

Around the pier the richness of life is astounding, with life forms totally alien to my daily life. Sponges, animals that look like plants, strange faces peering out of small cracks in the wooden piles. A nudibranch - a “sea-slug” - slips over a sponge garden, with bright colours above and below.

I return to the more open sea, away from the fishing lines, strung like cheese wires around the wooden piles, away from the teenagers throwing themselves off the pier, drunk on hormones, or possibly just drunk. I drift over a bed of sea grass, nursery lawn for many species, and slowly something shows itself. A weedy sea-dragon. At this point the lack of a camera causes more swearing. This is a 30cm (or so, I was rather excited!) fish in the same group as a seahorse. It shares the same pipe like structure, but its fins have evolved leaf shapes to hide it in the weed. It really is a remarkable animal. And it just sat there as I dived and dived to look and look. It became bored with the whole affair at about the same time as I needed a break, and it drifted off a few feet to one side and simply disappeared, like a ghost or a lost chain of thought. I knew it was there, but I could no longer find it. It was as if the few minutes I had watched it were a gift from it to me, that it could have hidden at any time if it wanted to, but for some reason it had not. Nonsense I know, but it was a bloody remarkable fish. And on the pier the drunks still throw themselves into the water and laughed when we asked them to stop jumping on us.

As I left the sea a small flock of Black-Tailed Cockatoos floated overhead on hitch-beat wings and called their weird and floating calls. I was back on land. I was back in the air. I was back on my side of the bay, but I wanted to go back to the other side, the underside, for there be dragons.

Rain in a time of drought.

2010-12-10T18:08:00.022+11:00

It’s been raining again. This may not strike so people as worthy of comment, but believe me it is. Northern Australia has had lots of rain, more than in any other spring in some places. Victoria has had the wettest spring in more than a decade. It’s raining right now from a strange copper brown sky. 22 mm of rain dripped into our rain gauge last night, and there will be more by morning.

The Yarra, normally tea coloured, is running like hot chocolate, heavy with clay. Ducks have to strike off upstream to go straight across, and once it’s plain you have no bread they cruise away from your boat on busy, unseen feet. Conserving energy when it’s clear that there is no food to be had.

The trees hang heavy in the mornings, lush with new growth, and some, sheen weighted with water, have given up the ghost and fallen over. Two have bent down to sleep in our area in the last week, driving branches deep into the water soaked soils. After heavy rain the paths are coated with wet tissue leaves, pounded and blown from the branches above. Sticks hang on phone wires and electricity cables. Some hang balanced in the trees themselves, waiting for the fall. Many trees have been giving up their sick and redundant branches, seemingly confident that new ones will grow. The streets are leaf littered. Many trees have an outer layer of pale green leaves, a halo of new growth where before there was only wilt and death. The ground is soft underfoot. Puddles last from one storm to another, and steep driveways pour thin silver streams into the street. In some places drains block and the water backs up, delayed on its seaward journey. The pressure of the water forced a plug of old leaves and blown dirt from the pipe above our tank and filled it with water in minutes.

Morning rain pushes train commuters into the shelter of the waiting rooms, which are far less grand than they sound. Business types busy themselves with laptops and smart phones, hoping that this is the week when they catch up with their dreams and their overdraft, both of which seem always to be just out of reach. Party girls and boys go home far too late or set off far too early, eyes darkly ringed. Students struggle with oversized bags. Everybody looks at the rain. Shop workers. Day trippers. Me.

It has become possible to look at the weather forecast without a sense of dread. In the long weeks of the last few summers it felt as if even the possibility of rain had gone. Day after day of clear blue skies and hot burning sun. This may sound perfect to some, but it’s not. Even in the city where people could work and live as their gardens died, you could feel the pressure growing. I have no idea what it would have been like to live where rain means money and food on the table and drought means another trip to the bank, another investment in hope. I would look at the sky and wonder if it would ever rain again. And sometimes it did. Heavy, violent storms that were as much a reminder of drought as they were a bringer of relief. They would turn up on hot summer afternoons, like a school yard bully, breaking up a fight they knew they had started, a fight between two silent and unyielding friends. Welcome in some ways, but still frightening. Relieving, but not relaxing. And each bucket of water saved in the shower or scooped from the bath reminded me of how small this effort was. I was trying to hold back drought and death one bucket at a time, pushing against a force that was invisible and unavoidable. Some form of climatic Canute. A battle of wills between human weakness and an implacable foe that was flint hearted and incapable of concern. On some days it felt like the whole of the worst case scenario climate change predictions had occurred over night. And as the catchments emptied it became harder and harder to see that our daily domestic efforts were doing any good at all. The politicians told us we were all doing very well, but then it was in their interest to do so. You don’t get re-elected by telling voters they are wasting their time.

The garden slates come to life with unfamiliar colour; washing lines and windows are lensed with sweat drop rain. Plastic toys, left overnight in the sandpit, cry small tears of loneliness, and still, remarkably, it keeps raining. The days warm and plants grow with unseemly haste, tomatoes swell on the plant and strawberries glow in the evening light. We elect a new government, but we barely talk about water and drought. The catchments are half full now, so that’s OK. But doesn’t that mean they are also half empty?

Down by the beach, where there was always more water than you wanted, but most of it out of reach, they have put the taps back on the public water pipes. The beachside showers are working again, so there will be less sand in the back seat of the car on the journey home. Paddocks which have been little more than dust bowls for year after year are waist deep in grass and flowers. A hare, which would normally use its speed to escape seems comfortable to sit in the open and not run, confident that it will find cover within seconds if it needs to. It watches with its wild eyes, before bursting off into the long grass. A few minutes later it wanders past again, all fright forgotten.

The tittle-tat rattle of rain on tins roofs becomes familiar again. The Murray reaches the sea. In Adelaide they pray for rain, and it comes - but not soon enough. Australia loses the cricket by an innings and 71 runs. Rain could have saved them, but in times of drought, who can put their faith in rain?

Over the last few days it has continued to rain. Busy days at work and tired kids in the evening have slowed the development of this post, and now it becomes clear that it is in need of a little refinement. While I have welcomed the rain, I happen to live in an insulated, urban vacuum, where rain should never be a matter of life or death, and when it becomes one, it is often due to misadventure, or plain stupidity.

But this is not the case everywhere. In some places rain is a matter of life and death every year. The drought placed almost unbearable pressure on many rural communities, and they bore the unbearable only with the help the banks, through government aid and with the hope that one day, one day soon, the rain would come good and crops would not wither down to dust. And for a while it seemed that those days had, at last, come. Winter and spring rains had brought bumper crops, the like of which had not been seen for a decade or more. These were crops to pay back debt, crops to get the banks off the backs of farmers, crops which could have lifted the darkness that had crippled so many people. These were crops that would undo some of the harm the last dry decade had brought. But in many places these crops now lie wet and rotting, as the rain that was once a blessing becomes a curse. In some places the crops are underwater, lost beyond hope of harvest. This is a random cruelty beyond measure.

Drought, flood, fires and now even locusts. It’s all a bit to biblical for me. I like the rain, but many people may beg to differ.