Snuffling in the dune wattle

Tags

echidna

A grey evening. A walk with a friend down to the lake through the spotted gum forest and up to the headland. A stroll along the low-tide beach to the sand-stairs back to my village. And then her sharp eyes, breaking through our chatter: “Look!”

We stood on the sandy track, looking, for ten minutes, as the echidna snuffled in the sand, among the dune wattles, unconcerned by our presence. Snout appearing. Back retreating. And then across the track, leathery feet emerging from the gold-tipped spines. Leaving faint claw marks. Continuing to snuffle. Then disappearing.

And us, home to dinner.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The river road 5

Tags

ferns, grasses, honeysuckle, Tuross River

This walking project was supposed to be a weekend adventure. Here am I, heading off just after wallaby time on a Wednesday morning. OK, I needed tomato paste and ground coriander from that general direction, but it would’ve been quicker not to walk as well.

But I walked. Today, along the course of the river, on a road with the hillside towering above me and dropping off beneath me, and the perfume of honeysuckle thick in the air. I caught a quick burst of the whipbird’s song, the mooing of cows, and then the approach of the school bus. Beneath the overhang of the cutting were wasp nests, and flourishing grasses, and almost vertically up, slim eucalypts. Below me the river wound, brown and sandy, but still moving in mini rapids in spots. Here were tree ferns, clinging to steepness and the russet unwhorling of their fronds. Kangaroo grass dropped its seeds and woggled in the occasional breeze.

My turn-back point today was marked by a signpost, a clump of letterboxes, a bracken-smothered track down to the water, and a patch of purple so vivid it resisted the camera.

The cutting

The river

Ferns

Honeysuckle

Turning point

Flowers and grass

?

?

Ozothamnus diosmifolius: Ball everlasting

Ozothamnus diosmifolius: Ball everlasting

Ozothamnus diosmifolius: Ball everlasting

Casuarina

Casuarina

?

Kangaroo grass

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Blue and gold, with a burst of purple

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Potato Point beach

A long time since a proper home-post. This morning, a simple walk along my beach. Tea coloured water. Wispy clouds, thin in a pale blue sky. Easy waves, no shock of cold against my ankles. Purple pig face spilling down eaten-away dunes. Fish, increasingly large, schooling through the creek. Amber reflections in a frame of mottled casuarinas. A bird, sharp black and white until it roosted, then a ball of indiscriminate fluff.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The river road 4

Tags

eucalypts, ferns, Tuross River, wildflowers

The place where I weekend is in the bush, 20km from my home by the sea. My current weekend walking project is to walk in stretches along the river road between Eurobodalla and Nerrigundah. I take the car to the farthest point I’ve walked to, hop out, and continue on. This is something of a pilgrimage along a road from my past, and it’s giving me great pleasure.

This week, I left the car at the top of Tallyho Hill and set off along a dirt road, with a drop off the edge into a steep gully. I heard the song of a lyrebird and the brief laugh of a kookaburra (unless of course that was the lyrebird too.) The bush was noisy with chirrupings, whistlings, and the vibrating whirr of a pigeon takeoff. The eucalypts sported long ribbons of bark and there were signs of rainforest: crinkle-edged leaves, vines and tall tree ferns. Everywhere in the bush, tall wattles with their pale yellow balls and their sweet smell. The sky a bleached grey with that disturbing glare and lack of substance. I walked down the hill around the twists in the road. On one side a gully: on the other side a steep bank, a rocky cutting rich with ferns and flowers – maidenhair, bracken and pinky rasp fern; faded schelhammeras, tiny white star flowers, purple and white violets, purple dianella with yellow-orange stamens, the gleaming white flowers of branching grass flag. At the bottom of the hill, a bridge and an underpass for cattle, the paddocks an astonishing green for this time of year. An assemblage of grass and flowers decorated the buffer at the bridge. Sandy curves of the river appeared and then retreated again: a vivid patch of purple fan flowers, delicate sprays of dianella in bud, yellow goodenia, and the richer yellow of hibbertia, with its splendour of buds. Occasionally the heat was relieved by a delicious breeze, more noticeable because the hill was generating an unaccustomed gentle sweat.

Only one vehicle passed me in an hour and a half on a Monday morning. I have now walked 8km of the river road.

tree fern

FLOWERS

Dianella

Dianella

?

Native violets

Fairy fan flower

Branching grass flag

Scelhammera

Hibbertia

Goodenia

Nature’s garden at bridge buffer

Along the Tuross River

Quartz in the cutting: once gold-mining country

On the edge of the road

RIBBONS OF BARK

Back up the hill beside the gully

I’m joining Jo’s Monday walk, with this ramble along the river road, the fourth in a series.

http://restlessjo.wordpress.com/jos-monday-walk/

 

 

 

 

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Travel theme: Numbers

Tags

numbers, Potato Point beach

 

It's a temptation to recycle old posts when the opportunity arises. Ailsa's invitation to add to her numbers theme was irresistible. To see the numbers the sea writes have a look at

http://morselsandscraps.wordpress.com//?s=Numbers

All I had to do to find these numbers was walk to the beach a few streets away from my house. It's a different kind of travel, to only move this far. I travel small distances to know my local delights intimately.

When you've savoured the works of that mathematician, the sea, go to wheresmybackpack to savour all kinds of numbers from all over the world.

Travel theme: Numbers

 

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Mission memories

Tags

childhood, Marsfield Mission

There it stands, a little brick church, Marsfield Mission. Non-denominational, but definitely protestant, my mother a founding member. Steep stairs leading up to the front door. An entry place with a benign man in a suit, sometimes my father, handing out hymnbooks. Inside, plainness: no crosses or stained glass windows. Just a plain brick wall with a crack running diagonally down behind the plain wooden pulpit, and a plain wooden frame for the hymn numbers. To the side an ancient organ, played by an woman with a beautiful face, a lavender and grey woman. A basic sermon, often preached by a man on “furlough from the mission field” (the language comes back to me), with occasionally a touch of hellfire and brimstone. On special occasions, sweet-voiced solos, and sometimes the mouth organ or the squeeze box. Not yet guitars.

At Christmas, a tall tree laden with presents for the Sunday school children, for the girls exquisite dolls made with love by the Sunday School teacher's mother out of lingerie off cuts from the Berlei factory. The Sunday school picnic at Fuller's Bridge. Devon and tomato sauce sandwiches. Red cordial. Iced cakes. Watermelon. Three-legged races and spinning on the merry-go-round. A row up the river. Rolling down the grassy hill. Occasionally the panic of losing someone. Always adolescent romantic intrigues.

The Sunday school anniversary. Practising songs, sung from tiered seating at the front of the church assembled for the occasion. Boys on one side, girls on the other. New dresses, home sewn – the one new dress of the year. In the early days, a hat and gloves. Fellowship teas, with speakers and wrangling over the washing up roster. Romantic intrigues pursued with tea towel in hand.

Games nights and progressive suppers and the annual harbour cruise. Tennis under the lights on the courts next to the church. Bushwalks. The Sunday School teachers' Australia day picnic at Narrabeen. Rambles round the rocks. Flirting and deep conversation. The next day, blazing sunburn.

Christian Endeavour, where I accompany choruses on my recorder. Write papers on bible themes. Remember stories of my father at Chistian Endeavour, admiring my mother's ankles. Train for bible quiz competitions, learning verses and the books of the bible. Go off to camps with kids from other churches at places like Stanwell Tops and Narrabeen. Prepare careful dioramas for the annual Christian Endeavour Convention in the Sydney Town Hall: tiny dolls and landscapes representing bible stories. The excitement of seeing other dioramas and wondering if we'd win.

This little church: centre of my early years.

 

 

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Thursday’s special: an inletscape

Tags

Dalmeny NSW

 

Dalmeny, southern NSW

 

Paula at http://bopaula.wordpress.com/2014/10/23/thursdays-special-landscape/ invites participation in her Thursday's special post. Her photos are always special, so click and look.

 

 

 

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Frogs

Tags

frogs, me painting

Dare I blog this? It's the kind of self-exposure I didn't expect a blog – or a friend – to demand of me. Yesterday, Loretta nudged me into painting rather than writing at Middle Earth, and she's hard to resist.

Before I knew where I was, a page had been sliced from my pad of canvasses, a sketch of a frog was plopped in front of me, I'd taken a sponge, dipped it in dobs of green and white acrylic, and created a background. Loretta whisked this away to dry and handed me a pencil. “Now, sketch a frog. Copy that one”, indicating a pencil sketch in a copy of Artist's palette. I shuddered and obeyed. My attempts were all out of proportion and the toes were pointy. So I practised frog toes all over my piece of paper, gradually getting them rounded, although padded was beyond my skill. Soon the page was filled with disembodied feet, and a congregation of distorted frog-bodies.

My splotchy background reappeared in front of me, accompanied by a piece of chalk. This was beginning to look like commitment. My job now was to transfer the pencil distortions onto the painted surface. Chalk is a forgiving medium and I was content with the blurry white outlines on green.

But my task mistress wasn't. “Now you paint them, Meg.” I tried not to see painting as colouring in and to remember to hold my fine paintbrush side on: a darker green first, a bit of white for frog-forehead and frog-mouth, red for frog-eyes. A pause, and then a fiddle with yellow for frog-bellies. My mentor's comment? “You can only get better”!

When I returned home the strain showed. I was garaging the car, singing inanely “I'm a frog! I'm a frog! I'm a frog!” when I realised my next door neighbour was on the other side of the bushes.

As I reflected on my day, I was glad I'd been given frog as a subject. Now I have frogs on canvas, and their image can't be “truthed” because I never see them, although they've been in full voice in puddles and creeks as I walk around after rain.

And that was my first attempt at painting on canvas with acrylic. I'll take three weeks off now, to gather strength for the next phase.

 

 

 

 

 

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The river road 3

Tags

grasses, roadside flowers

The river road sequence has got me. I lie awake at night trying to visualise the next segment. When I set off about midday it’s quite warm and I’m thankful for intermittent shade and an occasional cool breeze. A creek winds along a hollow, green with willows and grass, towards the hills. A crane flies over, vouchsafing me a blurred image. White trunks reach into the sky which today is a washed out blue. The lagoon is home to a group of geese, the mown paddock to bales of hay, the dam to reflections of the wooded hills. An unfamiliar bird perches on a gate, unperturbed by my presence.

I become aware of smells: the pungency of cow manure and the passing of a fox, and the sweet smell of honeysuckle. I hear the chirping of birds and the thwirr of wingbeat; the honking of geese; the croaking of frogs; the tentative sound of summer’s first cicadas. The side of the road is rich with grasses, and I’m most charmed by what we used to call soldier boys, a more interesting name than Plantago lanceolata. Minute flowers I saw in ones and twos yesterday are suddenly lining the road in tiny forests. The lurid purple and pink of vipers bugloss neons through the bracken. Honeysuckle clambers just out of reach across a weedy ditch. Maidenhair fern and bracken are fresh green after recent rain. Shivery grass shakes in the slightest puff of wind and fresh gum tips are a gleaming crimson, orange and a powdery pink.

The road begins to wind uphill past a farm called Tally-ho, and looking back I can see the Great Divide beginning to emerge above the lower hills. I reach the sign-post pointing to Nerrigundah and see that my river road has become an official cycling trail. I turn back, leaving the next segment for another weekend.

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The river road 2

Tags

cows, flowers, river road

It's Saturday again and I decide to pick up the river road where I left off last week, while my companion spends an hour working on the river reserve. He drops me off, and I set off. The property beside me is familiar to me from thirty years ago. An old lady lived there then (probably younger than I am now). She knew the world's business: I went for a job interview which I mentioned to no-one and I was hardly in the door at home when she rang and said “How did the job interview go?” That sort of old lady. As she aged more she became another sort of old lady. My car broke down one day near her place, and when I knocked on the door she answered with a gun in her hand.

She's long gone and the valley is peaceful. A tractor and a motorbike pass me, and then a car offering a lift. I can hear birds, invisible and unidentifiable, the scuffing of my feet, and occasionally the wind blowing across the casuarinas lining the river. A group of caramel cows walk along the thin line of the horizon observing me curiously – “A pedestrian? we don't see many of them around here” – and then skitter off in belated alarm, presenting rumps. Ducks make triangles on the lagoon as they paddle about their business. The hills on the other side of the river are splotched with the yellow of wattle, and edged with the maroon of new tips on the eucalypts. A man working near his stock yards yells a greeting. Looking back, I can see the mountains of the Great Dividing Range. I'm drawn to the gentle folds of the hills, old trees offering themselves and their shadows, old posts, and the water, of course, blue under a cloudless sky.

I stroll, and bend, and squat, and sit right down, and stretch, depending on the position of flowers or grasses demanding portraits. I mostly use my old camera, confident that it will give me some satisfying close-ups, but both cameras are slung round my neck. I encounter chicory, that lovely delicate blue flower last seen in the flower-meadow in Warsaw that I crossed every day on the way to the bus. I meet again the tiny star shaped flower with red striped berries, no bigger than the top of a pencil, that used to proliferate on the verge outside my house: and meet for the first time pink, brown and cream grass that waves energetically every time I get it in focus. Mostly what I see are beautiful invaders.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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