By the river

Tags

Deua River, frogs, gold processing, lotus pads, mangroves

Suddenly I have two hours unbespoke in my shopping town as I wait for the car to be serviced. I slide-walk down a grassy slope, water-dense after recent rain, and pass the old corrugated iron boatshed on the bank of the Deua River. The river is running fast and catching clouds. There are bright sun-spots where the mangrove pneumatophores meet the water. A man in a motorised wheelchair taking his dog for a walk murmurs hello. I stand in the gazebo near the lotus and water lily pond, which is bordered by desiccation. But the pool is loud with frogs, including the woody clack of what I think is a pobblebonk frog.

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The river looks tranquil, idyllic and unperturbed, but there is danger afoot. A mining company is seeking approval for a cyanide gold-processing plant in its headwaters. Local residents are concerned about spillages and pollution of the river and the water table: the company doesn’t have an unblemished record, and one small accident would be a disaster. Already one orchardist in Araluen has bulldozed 250,000 peach and nectarine trees: that’s three full time jobs gone and a lot of seasonal work – J used to prune, thin and pick there before he retired. There is a potential threat to the town water supply for parts of the Eurobodalla shire; concern about the future of market gardeners who grow and sell organic at the Tuesday afternoon farmers’ markets in Moruya; implications for the health of Batemans Marine Park, off the coast where the Deua River meets the sea. I have long been mystified and angered by the power mining companies seem to wield. They rape, pillage and pollute and then disappear with the profits, leaving the local community and environment permanently scarred.

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The flying pieman

Tags

art, Flying Pieman, Speewah, walking

What treasures I’m finding in my study purge. My bed is now littered with old copies of Artonview, the magazine of the National Gallery of Australia, which I leaf through in that twice-a-day liminal state between awake-and-asleep and asleep-and-awake.

A beautifully written and idiosyncratically conceived article, The story of Australian print making, by Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax, had an intriguing image of the Flying Pieman, with an even more intriguing story hinting at his walking exploits.

 

The flying pieman by William Nicholas 1847-48

 

This of course was irresistible to a woman who collects walkers for her pantheon of ambulants, so I went investigating. I discovered a man called William Francis King, once a school teacher, who after, so the story goes, an unsuccessful love affair, earned a living betting on his own walking prowess.

His walks always involved more than walking. He might carry a goat or a dog weighing over thirty kilos hoiked over his shoulder. Or he might challenge himself to walk 192 miles in 48 hours, round and round the Maitland racecourse: he finished this marathon in 46.5 hours. On another occasion he “ran a mile, walked a mile, wheeled a barrow a half-mile, dragged a horse carriage with a 89-kilogram lady half a mile, walked half a mile backwards and leapt over 50 stones set 91 centimetres apart”: this took him less than 90 minutes.

He was unmissable, sporting a flamboyant moustache and wearing “white stockings, crimson knee breeches, a blue jacket and a top hat bedecked with coloured streamers”, none of which show up in the subdued colours of the print.

However, his story is not a parable lauding the benefits of walking, at least not à la William Francis King. Gradually people realised it was foolish to bet against him, his income dried up, he became corpulent, he wandered the streets of Sydney selling pies (hence his nickname) and offering unsolicited rambling proclamations, a parody of his glory days. He died in the Liverpool asylum.

The stories about the Flying Pieman have something of the flavour of the tall tale, a favourite Australian yarn-spinning genre, typified in stories about Crooked Mick and the Speewah, a mythical outback station where dust storms are so thick rabbits dig burrows in them and trees so tall they have hinged tops to let the sun through. However, King’s legendary exploits are reported in respectable newspapers such as The Maitland Mercury, and he has earned a place in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, where he is tagged #pedestrianist and #street character.

 

Acknowledgements

I harvested these stories from a newspaper article and the Australian dictionary of biography

 

 

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After heavy rain

Tags

after heavy rain, foam, iridescence, seaweed

Every time I go to the beach near my place, I think “Oh well, I suppose there’ll be nothing new.” Today the creek is open and the Tuross River north of Blackfellows Beach flooded. Sea mist rises like smoke at the end of the beach; the sky is layered with clouds and blue: and creek and ocean fight it out in a roiling of tea, khaki and white, courtesy of the flooded Tuross River. Seaweed is wreathed in bubble-mesh, a tracery over its shapes and holes, instead of offering its usual dark strappy gleam. The sea is murky and deposits mud on the beach at the tideline. But the mud is lacy, a delicate deep brown edging of the paler sand-lace. The foam brought in by each wave-surge quivers in the light breeze: iridescent bubbles hold their shape briefly, and then collapse.

Nothing new?

Feedback please: I’ve finally started resizing my photos, from MB to KB, shocked into action by a too-large internet bill. Please let me know if you think I’ve resized them too small.

Acknowledgement

I too am playing around with a circle frame. Thank you, Jude and Pauline, for reminding me of this possibility.

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Eurobodalla beaches: Bar Beach South

Tags

Bar Beach South, danger, history, Laurelle Pacey, Narooma bar, Wagonga Inlet

My coastline offers varied beaches, sometimes miles long, and sometimes, like this one, curled neatly around a much smaller distance. Bar Beach South backs onto the Wagonga Inlet, and is enclosed by a breakwater, built between 1976 and 1978 to reduce bar-crossing problems.

Historically, the Inlet was quite busy: by 1905 there was a service from Sydney every fortnight, bringing cargo and passengers from Sydney and taking timber back: between 1910 and 1920 there could be four ships at anchor at once. The bar has always been dangerous, or at least cantankerous. There were many delays and founderings in the old days, as coastal steamers headed out to sea loaded down with cheese from south coast dairies and timber for ship building. There were six wrecks between 1865 and 1888. The Comet, (no date) carrying 50 bags of onions, cases of early peaches, and bags of oysters had to wait a month for a favourable wind. In 1921, the Wee Clyde, built on the shores of Wagonga from Gulaga spotted gum (Corymbia maculata), was trapped a number of times with shipments of cheese and timber. The Bodalla ran aground in 1924, losing a cargo of furniture, sugar, salt, liquor and kegs. The Pilot station, built about 1902, now base for the Royal Volunteer Coastal Patrol, used to raise a black ball to indicate that the entrance was closed when crossing the bar was too dangerous.

It can still be dangerous: heading out to Baranguba on a tourist boat you have to put lifejackets on to cross. Even now there are drownings, especially in the holiday season. However, the water is tranquil as I walk along the beach towards Narooma township and the pilot station cottage on the hill. The beach is shark-netted and sheltered: it's hard to believe this is where my daughter launched me onto surfing waves all those years ago. From many points you can't even see the opening of the bar.

I walk along the sand, and veer right at the bright pinky-purple pigface to return to the car via the road. I look across Wagonga Inlet – in the foreground spiky grass and wattle; then the pines in front of the caravan park; and along the horizon the low form of Gulaga reclining.

 

 

 

 

This post owes debts to

• Tish Farrell, who always knows the history of her place, and W.G. Sebald to whom she introduced me.
• Laurelle Pacey, a local historian who knows how to write, from whose book Narooma's Past – steamers, sawmills and salmon (2001) I drew my information about Wagonga Inlet's history.
• My former self, the one who was a meticulous researcher for two years ten years ago, and who wrote notes that my present self recovered, on p. 68 ff of Notebook 1 of 3, contents of page written in red at the top!

 

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Eating orchids

Tags

Aboriginal farming, Beth Gott, Tim Low, tubers

It pays to leaf through old copies of the Australian natural history magazine, before depositing them in the recycle bin. Doing just this I found an article by Tim Low in vol 22, no 5, Winter 1987. He was conducting a long-term study of the traditional foods of Aborigines, and was alerted by a botanist, Beth Gott, to the food potential of orchid tubers. She wrote about finding a colony of Pterostylis nutans, at a density of 440 plants per square metre, yielding 800 tiny tubers weighing 126 grams. Of course I was fascinated, after my recent encounter with nodding greenhoods, and so was Tim Low.

He embarked upon a taste-testing tour. Here are his findings.

Glossodia major (common wax lip). It has a single egg-shaped tuber with a pointed tip and a watery slightly sweet flavour with a bitter after taste. In his words “not nice.”

Common wax lip (my photo)

Diuris maculata (leopard orchid). This one has two bullet shaped tubers, 3cm long and 6mm wide. It is glutinous, starchy, filling and “stuck cloyingly to my gums.”

Pterostyilis longifolia (tall greenhood). Sporting a pair of globular tubers, 12 mm broad, it tastes “watery and bitter.”

 

The two pea-sized white tubers of Caladenia carnea (pink fingers) tasted “sweet and juicy”.

Pink fingers (my photo)

Dipodium punctatum (hyacinth orchid) has one of the largest tubers, six fibrous roots, 8 mm thick and longer than a finger, which need cooking to make them palatable. Their rival for size is Gastrodia sesamoides (potato orchid). He doesn't comment on its flavour.

Hyacinth orchid and Potato orchid (my photos)

His awards for “especially tasty” go to the walnut sized potatoes of Lyperanthus suaveolens (brown beaks) and the “fragrantly flavoured starch” of the horned orchid, Orthoceras strictum.

Tubers of Brown beaks, from the article

In The biggest estate on earth, a weighty account of how Aboriginal people shaped the Australian landscape, Bill Gammage quotes Sturt's 1849 journal as he explored in what is now western Victoria / South Australia.

On the other side of Mt Terrible the country is very scrubby for some miles, until, all at once, you burst upon the narrow but beautiful valley of Mypunga … covered with orchidaceous plants of every colour, amidst a profusion of the richest vegetation.

Gammage notes that many orchids bloom after fire, and this quotation is part of his extended argument about how Aborigines managed the land with fire. These orchids weren't there by accident, but as part of a regime of harnessing wild flowers and animals for food: a form of farming in fact.

In his article Low offers a couple of interesting sidelights on orchids as food, for people other than the traditional owners of this country.

He quotes the Australian botanist, Joseph Maiden, who wrote in 1898: There is hardly a country boy who has not eaten … the tubers of numerous kinds of terrestrial orchids.

He also records an extract from Anne Pratt's 1891 book, “Flowering plants, grasses, sedges and ferns of Great Britain”, which eulogises the properties of orchid starch or salep / saloop in a working man's diet.

Salep is little used now in this country; but less than a century since, the Saloop-house was much frequented, and the substance was a favourite repast of porters, coal-bearers, and other hard-working men. It is said to contain more nutritious matter in proportion to its bulk than any other known root, and an ounce of salep was considered to afford support to a man for a day; hence those who travel in uninhibited countries have greatly prized so portable a vegetable food.

Many of the orchids Low samples are familiar to me, but I'd never thought of them as a food source. I won't be decimating the ranks of any colonies I find by conducting my own taste testing. I'll take Tim Low's word for it and thank him for giving me another dimension to my understanding of orchids.

 

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The Liston saga: final chapter

Tags

alpacas, cria, rooster

Dickens always finishes his novels, as do other Victorians, by rounding off the stories of his characters. So here we go. Although I am definitely no Dickens, I have capacities I suspect he might envy. I can quote directly from Facebook (in blue) and link to WordPress.

While we were wrangling my daughter's menagerie, she was off-stage doing some wrangling of her own. You can read about it in the log of the journey from Slovakia to Warsaw with a pair of inventive twins.

The Liston menagerie has had a few adventures since we left.

Victor the rooster, one of the first Liston chickens, was taken by a fox two days after our departure. My daughter says:

He was an old warrior, almost seven, and maybe this was a better end than a lingering old age. I think it was the same cheeky fox that chased Leopard. We've got pacas and dogs all over both yards, so I think he had left the safety.

But that was not the end. He reappeared, minus an eye, and is once again flourishing, victor over a fox.

 

Boo the orgler (I promise! My last use of that word) and Scout his younger brother have moved to the farm of friends. Mel is one of the very few people who like Boo, and he and his brother will take on a new role as sheep guardians. Boo can spit at intruders and attackers, and be praised for it, rather than arousing my ire by spitting at the defenceless cria.

They are both “for the cut” as soon as the weather warms up.

Operation Orgle a success. We wish Boo and Scout well as they move onto a life of gainful employment. They have a creek, and a young forest of native trees and a horse.

 

The cria now has a name.

We are totally unsure about gender – s'he has lots of foldy genital flesh that might be balls or might just be pudge. In the interests of non-gender specificity we are calling it Johnny-May. Doesn't that sound like the worst trailer-trash name ever?

The name is an anglicisation of Jaś (Jan) and Maja. Aunty promised the twins she would name the baby after them.

Em resumes her indecently early morning-runs.

Murder mysteries often start with the early-morning lone dog-walker finding the mutilated corpse. Don't think this doesn't cross my mind whenever Emmy tries to pull me off the path in the 4 am gloom. It would have to be a man. I'm tired of the trope of the woman as victim.

Leopard returns to animal sacrifice, and Loki remains inoffensive.

The holiday slowly fades for my daughter. She is emerging from jet lag, and returning to domesticity.

As I come out of my stupor I notice that the crockery and cutlery fairy has paid us a visit. Thank-you, kitchenware support.

 

The animal carers and kitchenware support team are reclaiming their lives on the coast and in the bush respectively: digging gardens, burying wallabies, clearing a study of the detritus of years, going to the movies and buying tickets to return to Warsaw in March, 2016.

 

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Bench series: August

Tags

colourful benches, Narooma

Here's a colourful bench, to join the rest in Jude's bench collection. There are a number of such benches newly scattered around Narooma, and always in the company of a more traditional bench. I'm wondering if there's a meaning or a function I'm missing. The view is wonderful, out over the inlet to the curves of the coastline, and north towards my village.

 

 

 

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Tumbledown

Tags

fences, Rose Macaulay, sheds

I'm bemused by the fascination of ruins. Why? I ask myself. There's some insight in the definition of wabi sabi I found in J's philosophy magazine – “Nothing lasts … Nothing is finished … Nothing is perfect … Wabi refers to the attraction of rustic simplicity, humble by choice. Sabi means the bloom of time.” But why should this draw me every time?

I'm eager to read Rose Macaulay's The pleasure of ruins for further illumination, but two attempts to acquire it have failed. The free download cut out at page 76, and the print was inked brokenly, so the text itself looked as if it was in the process of ruin. I found a Thames and Hudson copy, second hand, for $6, but the postage was $76. None of the libraries I investigated had a copy. So I remained semi-mystified, with limited aids to thought. Then I found an online post that quoted generously from Macaulay. The introduction left me in no doubt that I must read the book. What ruin-lover could resist “an inquisition into the images, philosophy, theology, archaeology and literature of ruin”? Here's a taste of what Macaulay says:

 

She compares ruins to “the extant fragments of some lost and noble poem” and says that ruins make “poets and artists of nearly all tourists”. She speaks of the “familiar tragedy of archaeology—the sacrifice of beauty to knowledge”. Of the attraction of ruins she says “The human race is, and always has been, ruin-minded. The literature of all ages has found beauty in the dark and violent forces, physical and spiritual, of which ruin is one symbol”. She quotes Byron, and of course Ozymandias.

 

Whatever the reasons, ruins give me pleasure. Here are three between my daughter's house and my iPad connection spot, along about 3km of the Mt Lindesay Highway.

 

 

 

 

A grey wall, a green ruin, rusty pike, / Make my soul pass the equinoctial line / Between the present and past worlds, and hover / Upon their airy confine, half-seas-over.

Byron: Don Juan, Canto X

 

Just in case Macaulay's not enough, look at this delicious bibliography!

 

Michael S. Roth, Claire Lyons and Charles Merewether, ed., Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1997).

Robert Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins (New York: Rodopi, 2004).

Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (Oxford: Berg, 2005).

Dylan Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason (New York: Peter Lang, 2007).

Nicholas Yablon, Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of Urban Modernity, 1819-1919 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009).

Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle, ed., Ruins of Modernity (Durham: Duke U P, 2010).

Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (London: Verso, 2010).

Brian Dillon, ed., Ruins (London and Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT, 2011).

 

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Collecting shells … and a few other things

Tags

feather, lichen, reflections, shells

Finally I have the study clear, and it's beginning to seem like a pleasant place to be, sun and light pouring in, and the faint sound of the sea. The living room? Now, that's a different story! Chaos is its title. So I escape into the morning to walk along my beach for the first time since the beginning of the year, and indulge in the soothing pastime of shell-collecting. I can't resist feather, lichen, rocky sand shelf, sand ripple and reflections in the creek either.

 

 

 

 

 

PS For a great whale shot click here.

 

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Behind Bengello

Tags

"Snugglepot and Cuddlepie", banksia, behind Bangello Beach, gumnuts, moss, nodding greenhood, Pterostylis nutans, wattle

Last week, I visited my coincidentally Polish accountant to sort out my tax and ask financial questions from the abyss of my financial ignorance. After such an encounter, I usually find an unwalked beach and explore with a picnic lunch. This time it was high tide, and I don’t walk on beaches at high tide.

So I stopped at a sandy track, guarded by frantically flowering wattle, and stumbled across six prolific colonies of greenhood orchids: Pterostylis nutans I think. They were hiding amongst bracken just off the track, heads demurely facing the ground. In each colony, I counted at least 30 plants. If I saw six colonies I reckon there’d be many more: if I counted 30 plants it would have to be a conservative estimate.

But the orchids weren’t the only treasures. There was moss: soft spring green; spiky, star-like pinky-red and green; flowers (are they flowers?) wavering on the end of thin red stalks.

Mosses

Then there were the many faces of banksias: flower; seed pods opened; hairy dead flowers; dead flowers broken open into red; stippled bark, some showing signs of fire; and closed seed pods. Gumnuts, round urns, littered the ground wherever there were eucalypts.

May Gibbs, in her children’s book Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, transformed banksia cones into villians, the Big Bad Banksiamen, and gumnuts into the characters of the title, a pair of gumnut babies. My leather bound copy was a gift from J on our third wedding anniversary, a memento of my childhood pleasure in this Australian classic.

Banksias

Eucalypt gumnuts

Everywhere was the brightness of wattle, which has to be called golden, and which is one of the signatures of home for me.

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