Eurobodalla beaches: Josh’s Beach

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Josh’s Beach

This is the last of the Eurobodalla beaches in the southern part of the shire – or at least the last of the named ones.

On Saturday morning J is going to an alternative energy expo – not something I want to share – so after I deposit him, I meander off without much of a plan. Idly, I turn off the coast road between Kianga and Dalmeny and experience the now- familiar weekend astonishment as I crest a hill and see an unfamiliar rocky coastline spread out ahead of me. A turnoff I must have passed hundreds of times, mind you, and a rocky coastline about 20 kilometres from home. I love the way these pleasures have been lying in wait for my declining years. At least that’s when I’m not thinking “What the heck have I been doing all my life?”

The road is flanked by alcoves mowed and spangled with dandelions and blue star-shaped flowers with minute maroon berries. Close behind the beach are houses, and the cliff-edge has been landscaped: grasses, trees, mint bushes, spectacular purple berries, and in wilder places, escapee red hot pokers.

I park the car in a dead-end street, and stride along the cycleway, passing a wooden staircase down to the beach, and side-stepping a pavement penguin with green-pebble eyes. My green-jelly eyes gobble up great chunks of rocky coastline, and the blue blue sea scintillating with sun-drops. Waves break and the foam recedes, captured by a current that sometimes carries it, an untidy white ribbon, from headland to headland. I’m not the only one who relishes the view: a sign warns that there is an $110000 fine for removing, lopping or poisoning trees between the house line and the cliff edge.

I pause at a lookout and read two information panels. One acknowledges the long presence of Aborginal people feasting on shellfish for thousands of years and leaving behind gigantic middens. The other one offers an armada of coastal steamers, linking the south coast with Sydney: passengers and supplies this way; passengers, butter, cheese and timber on the return journey.

I walk on past banksias to the point where I can see the coastline stretching south before I turn back. Joggers overtake – thud, thud, thud – usually in pairs: a cyclist pauses at a bench and indulges in arcane exercises; a family group approaches keeping slow pace with grandma on a walking frame; I murmur “G’day” to a couple wheeling a pram.

I go down the wooden staircase onto the beach. A small boy up to his ankles in the sea, shouts at the waves, and two family groups lounge on the beach. I head to the rock platform to the north as the day heats up.

The beach is rocky: long ridges, intricate lattice-work, ironstone dividers.

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When it gets too hot, I return to the shade in one of the grassy alcoves, and begin writing this post en plain air. Then the summons to collect J. I bring him back here for a picnic lunch (dips, triple Brie, sardines, and corn thins), supervised by a couple of splendidly disrobing spotted gums.

Why is it called Josh’s Beach? A schoolteacher at Narooma Central School in the 1960s lived in Ocean Parade and his surfie students used to call it Josh’s beach after him. We name our beaches strangely here: after poisons (1080) and now after a school teacher. The name became official recently, and caused a heap of controversy. Other locals have called it many things over the years: Rocky Beach, Back Beach, Little Beach, Our Beach. Somehow, after a visit from the Central Mapping Authority, who talked to an ex-councillor, Josh’s Beach became its official name. It’s also known as the beach with nomadic sand – sometimes there’s sand and sometimes there isn’t.

Bogolo

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Bogola Headland, Bogolo Formation, braided essay, Natalie Stokes

I

You sit across the table from one another, you and Natalie. Her offering is a closely argued document called “Relationship of mafic rocks and surrounding rocks in the inferred subduction complex, Batemans Bay district, south-eastern NSW”. In front of you is a small black notebook, with the hopeful heading Geology 2017. You are here to negotiate understanding, you a novice geologist with serious limitations, her a university student offering her honours thesis. You feel blessed to have found her. She writes about a place you’ve visited, and she draws detailed  diagrams of different formations, which is the next best thing to her actually standing on a rock, pointing at it, and saying “This is the Bogolo formation. See here and here and here … these are the characteristics.”

But unfortunately for you, she uses words as well as diagrams, lots of them. Her lexicon is as dense as gabbro. One sentence might offer you “shear zone thickening”,  “olistrostomal flows” and “disrupted bedding”, leaving you with very little to hang understanding on. Simple pronouns lack meaning as you fail to understand their antecedents. Even a phrase like “migration of faults” where you know the meaning of the words in isolation raises questions about what exactly they mean here. However, she’s done her bit, so she leaves you to it.

You struggle on because you really want to know. You think about yourself as a learner: that urge to go and do something else – knit, cook, even housework – rather than battle on through the hard bit. “Geology for dummies” doesn’t always provide the desired definition.

It’s a long long time since you’ve done such intellectual battle. You mainly read history where the discourse and language is familiar. Even an occasional foray into the world of Nabokov’s butterflies or Gawande’s history of cancer doesn’t make this kind of stringent demand. There, if you don’t understand you can skim over the hard bit without missing too much. Rocks and their foundation stories make no such concessions. If you want to understand you have to persist and hope that eventually you’ll get it.

II

The Bogolo formation is more than 90% mudstone. Long, long, long ago very fine clay particles settled at the bottom of the ocean or a lake or a lagoon or a peaceful stretch of river. Slowly the resulting mud was buried and compressed by the weight of more sediment. The water squeezed out and the slurry became rock. But the Bogolo Formation isn’t just mudstone: it’s a mélange, including fragments and blocks of sandstone and basalt with a diameter somewhere between a centimetre and twenty metres in an unsorted mishmash. As a sedimentary rock it should be layered, but it isn’t, not systematically. It’s been knocked about in its formation. Geologists can’t agree on how. Caught up in a monstrous flow of debris? Crunched up in a fault system? A casualty of huge mud volcanoes? It hasn’t had an easy time of it, whichever explanation you go with.

III

It’s a glorious spring day as I walk down the spur to Bogola Headland, Gulaga looming a few paddocks away on my right and the sea sprawling and sparkling on my left. Surely this is where I’ll find laid out before me the Bogolo Formation Natalie has introduced me to and that I’ve read so much about. I round the corner and step onto a rock platform. It’s flat, unbroken by the fissures or the sharp edges that usually make rock hopping a business of intense concentration. I stroll over the surface, mostly level, no need to grapple with foot-eye coordination, except occasionally where a boot-sized hunk extrudes. The rock, grey-ochre, silver, purple, copper-streaked, with occasional constellations of white specks, has an almost talc-like smoothness and occasional stripes. I reach my hand down and stroke the silkiness and the slightly rougher streaks. Small nodules / excrescences in the vertical surface take the shape of coronet, braid, necklace. Near the ocean, lumps become pinnacular, sharp edged, huge. It’s easy to look and describe: I’m quite at home with rock patterns, the sun and the sea.

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Picking the neighbours’ flowers

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garden flowers

It’s daybreak. A woman leaves her house stealthily, flower camera slung around her neck. Shapes disentangle themselves from the dimness and bound off as she approaches. There is no one around, not even any lights on yet. Perfect for stealing images she wouldn’t dare appropriate in full daylight on the crowded streets of Potato Point. She shows some restraint. She might lean over the fence line, but she never trespasses beyond the boundary. And what a bouquet she collects! Flowers she’d never grow herself, but why bother, when someone else does it for her?

I suspect the inspiration for these flower-thefts might have been DJ’s Brunswick series.

RegularRandom: 5 minutes with track-shadows

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RegularRandom, shadows

When you head out for a headland ramble, you never know what might tickle the camera’s fancy. On this walk it is the shadows that overlay and accentuate the different textures of path on my headland walk.

As always, I’ve played fast and loose with RegularRandom rules: this was the result of 5 minutes of clicking, not 5 consecutive minutes. This week, despite impending surgery, DesleyJane has excelled herself (a very hard thing to do) with stunning portraits of a snail.

Weekend pleasures

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Grey Rocks, Kelly’s Lake, rock gardens, rock patterns, skyping Warsaw

But first a riff on memory, or in this case its non-existence. We begin our Saturday explore at Gray Rocks, and head north along Bingi Beach to an area of castellations, dykes and honeycombed rocks. As I fade into afternoon sleep, I compose a post in my head. Before I write it, I search my blog to see whether I’ve featured this Eurobodalla beach before. Sure enough, there it is, dated 2015, and the words are pretty much the ones I’d shaped as I dozed off. Suddenly I feel some sympathy for our aging Australian history lecturer who gave us the same lecture three days in a row back in the 1960s.

I revamp my post into an extended list of pleasures.

Rock patterns

There’s no escape from these and little chance of exact repetition, since the supply is inexhaustible. Even when the patterns are of the same genre, say a creamy-apricot meander of veins, the particular example is guaranteed to be different.

Rock gardens

This segment is for Gilly who admired rock gardens in a previous post.

Grey Rocks granite provides an endless supply of nooks and crannies where plants take root, sometimes grasses and pigface endemic to the coast, and sometimes runaways from gardens.

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Amongst tonalite and xenoliths

While J scrutinises the rocks on the waterline, marked as tonalite by the presence of darker grey foreign rock enveloped when magma ruled, I move around for the sheer joy of stepping from rock to rock: across gaps, up and down, rarely these days needing to use my well-practised tactic of bumming it.

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Lake walk

Sometimes the best plans are those that appear when you overturn other plans. A quick look at the south side of Grey Rocks becomes absorbing, and then we’re drawn to a rocky outcrop further south, and then we’re close to Kelly’s Lake and the Dreaming Track that follows it as it winds parallel to the beach. So why not go there instead of back to the castellations on the north end of the beach? Past curvaceous tidelines and reflections and sand gardens, onto a mossy track through casuarinas and old banksias and thick flowering vines, past lichen logs and bright orange fungi deployed along a fissured branch, noting a perfect assemblage of leaf, twigs and casuarina nut, following the trail of the posse of horses we’d seen earlier on the beach.

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Skyping Warsaw 

Now the days are getting longer, we decide to leave the bush at skyping time and take Warsaw to the beach. It’s a short yarn this evening because my daughter’s hungry. Maja wants to show us their chosen birthday cake – they’re 5 in a month – not only the rocket ships they have chosen, but every other cake in the Australian Women’s Weekly book of birthday cakes. I watch awed as she holds up the book and makes sure we can see, a skill I never mastered in kindergarten classrooms. She begins to take her undies off and mother remonstrates. But she doesn’t want to display a bare bottom. She wants to show us the rockets ships and planets that decorate them.

There’s been a change in twin dynamics: Jas used to be twin to the fore, but he’s in the background tonight. After 15 minutes, we begin to sign off, walking along the beach in a strange procession, J in the lead with the iPad facing the ocean, me stumbling along behind carrying two folding chairs, a spare iPad, and discarded jumpers and hats.

RegularRandom: 5 minutes with a bucketful of history

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memoir, objects from the past, RegularRandom

Forty years ago we packed up an old blue van, an aging Corolla, and two children (4 and 3 months) and drove down the coast to Bodalla. “Don’t let him do it to you” said my mother-in-law. But we ignored her, pitched our marquee, got pregnant again pretty well immediately. “Aha” said my maiden aunts, “So that’s what happens when you don’t have TV”.  While I mothered, J began building the house. 

Now, forty years later, he’s raking up leaves expecting a gnarly fire season. As he rakes, he unearths bits of the past. “Here’s a bucketful for your 5 minutes” he says. and I begin a journey through reminders of the past. 

I pull things out of the bucket and place each one (I give up on composing still lifes) separately, using as my background a pile of raked up leaves the wind and scratching lyrebirds have left undisturbed 

Here’s a jar, miraculously unbroken. We used to store stuff in the tent where we lived  for 8 months, cooking and heating baby’s bottle in the middle of the night on a gas burner.

Here’s the cap off said baby’s bottle. She’s now 40 and the mother of  5 year old twins.

The breadvan lives again, drawn up from the past by its petrol cap.

The marquee, later used to store tomatoes on our market garden block until it was shredded by the weather, is resurrected by a tensioning spring.

Then there’s a cluster of miscellanea: the rusted head of a hammer; the wire dome of a kerosene heater; the side valve cover from one of the rotary hoes that turned over the soil in our market garden; the gear wheel of the seed planter; the cover plate from a different rotary hoe; and the tail lamp cover from the breadvan.

The horseshoe is a later intrusion, a treasure discovered by the kids and brought home only to lose it again.

The piece of dimpled glass is all that remains of a spare door from my mother-in-law’s house.

The teaspoon is part of a set belonging to my mother, still astonishingly shiny, hard to figure out exactly how it ended up here, unless I was prone to pocketing the family silver.

But maybe the most evocative item is a child’s thong. The small foot that ran around the bush wearing this stands in for eight small feet that grew larger and larger until they headed off into adulthood and around the world. It’s hard to believe our youngest grandchildren are now older than our children were as these bits and pieces were laid down for later discovery.

This is my response to DesleyJane’s weekly RegularRandom challenge. I’ve just re-read the rules and realise I am not particularly abiding by them, except insofar as I spent five minutes with these objects. To see what people who do abide by the rules achive, click here. You will, first of all, be captivated by a cactus.

Eurobodalla beaches: Wallaga Beach, part 2

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Wallaga Beach

The sea crashes and slurrs. Seagulls call harshly. There’s an occasional startling explosion as foot inadvertently steps on stranded bluebottle; the gentler brief sniffing of a curious dog; the murmur of an exchange that’s becoming routine: “Isn’t it a perfect day?” “Yes, but we so badly need rain.”

The tide is low and the sun warm, and there’s a tantalising spread of sand between the tideline and the rocky outcrop that looks like the pyramidaical slabs of a South American temple. “Aha!” says J as I catch up. “Today we get to see what lies around that corner. Any guesses?”

I’d be mad to attempt a guess. There is absolutely no predictability about these rocky outcrops that have colonised our beaches, our weekends and our minds. As for understanding the geological processes that made them thusly, or even the names of the rock materials – hope on.

But ignorance can’t spoil wonder at what appears around the corner: a rockscape of canyons, nooks and caverns.

Fountains of grass and cascades of succulents accessorise the rockface, which has many subtle beauties of its own.

High above on the cliff a farmer lays tumbledown claim right up to the very edge.

Such solid masonry of rock, sometimes rumpled and wrinkled, sometimes layered chunks, sometimes crannied, mostly tilted, and dare I say it yet again? Totally unlike anything we’ve seen before.

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Look south across a vast expanse of sand: there is no sign of the grandeur of the slabby rocks, the caverns, the cliffs, the canyons: they have all disappeared back into undistinguished flatness.

To see Wallaga Beach before you head around the rocks, click here.

I began writing this nearly a month ago: since then we’ve had good rain, so the greeting has changed to “Wasn’t the rain wonderful?”

Eurobodalla beaches: Honeymoon Beach

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Honeymoon Beach

The musical accompaniment to Honeymoon Beach one Saturday in November is the sound of the ocean and the ear-drilling shrilling of cicadas, that sound of summer and exams.

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I walk down a track to the cosy beach, both headlands curling round to embrace it. A burly man is body-surfing, towel draped over a rounded rock, and offshore a couple of men in a tinny are trying to catch breakfast. It’s a few beaches up from Bingi Bingi where we’ve spent the last two weekends, and we’re hopeful that what we see here geologically will confirm what we learnt there.

The southern rock platform has been doused by the receding tide, but is oddly unslippery. Six dykes cut across it close to shore, of not immediately identifiable rock, a light browny colour between the darker rock into which it has long since intruded.

J does a daunting clamber to get further, and I decide to look for a track across the grassy headland. It’s not easy to find and I’m going higher and higher, so I abort and amble along the beach to the north. I pass an outcrop of rectangular columns and squarish chunks, honeycombed in places, with ledges and human-added piles of grey pebbles and elegant driftwood.

I expect to find more of the same at the other end. I’m in for a surprise.

Everywhere, embedded in rough-textured brownish rock, are dark ovoid shapes. What in the history of the earth has happened here?

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I move beyond the first astonishing sight, heading towards the castellations at the end of the beach. I looking at a slanting reddish rockface, and decide I want to go up it. There are plenty of footholds and I sidle past coastal rosemary onto a sandy track where all I need to do is keep an eye open for snakes and make sure I don’t become foot-entangled in grass. Then I’m high above the sea, looking down on pools surfaced with Neptune’s beads and an easily accessible cove, which I leave for the next day when I see J hovering near the car.

On Sunday, we return and do indeed move around the rocks to the north, after restartlement by those rounded rocks. As always, what looked like easy access to the next beach turns out to be a number of rocky ridges poking out into the ocean. I negotiate the first one, feeling very pleased with my new-found steady-feet, and sit in contemplation while J, again, ventures on. Sea grasses swirl with each roll of the waves, distant figures walk along next week’s beach, and sharp edges have me moving in search of a less uncomfortable perch.

I’m so proud of my clambering I actually commission J to document my descent of the slant-rock back to Honeymoon Beach: not quite Everest, but something I could not have done a month ago.

RegularRandom: 5 minutes with yoghurt, a car park grevillea and the police

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grevillea, RegularRandom

For once I abide by the 5 minute rule. For once I don’t crop. For once I don’t saturate, brighten or sharpen. These flowers are as the camera saw them.

All thanks to yoghurt. I park illegally, waiting for J to grab a carton of yoghurt to use as starter in the brown pottery lidded container that belonged to my aunt: it sits on the back of his fuel stove on the wooden block where the winter python coils. He resists a mate’s long ago advice – one of those mates who has advice about everything, from cooking tripe to the best cleaning agent – to wrap it in an old woollen jumper, largely because he needs to wrap himself in the only old woollen jumper he owns. When it sets, we eat it droozled with leatherwood honey.

Back to the car park, where I’m in a “No parking” zone. My eye is captivated by these grevillea and I hop out to photograph them. J returns just as I finish, and points out that there’s a police car behind me. I briefly wonder whether there’s a new ordinance forbidding the appropriation of images of flowers owned by the council, but the police merely want to head south without doing an illegal u-turn.



This week DesleyJane’s RegularRandom features a luscious-looking beetroot and chocolate muffin. Click here if you want your mouth to water, and for links to other 5-minute offerings.

Eurobodalla beaches: Pooles

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Pooles Beach

Imagine this.

A spread of spotted gums, burrawangs and grazing wallabies. Early morning, sun raying lines in a grey sky as you reach the sea. North, a series of rocky coves. Step down a wooden staircase to explore them before the tide cuts you off. Big pebbles. Rocks stretching out into the sea. Strange vertical layers. Rough conglomerate. Extruding lumps. Light turning briefly golden.

 

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Then south across a sandy expanse. A pool, reflecting tall eucalypts. Flowering grasses. Lines of bluebottles marking the reach of the tide.

At the southern cliffs, a rock suite of orange, ochre, grey, white, beige, blushing pink. A drama of grey clouds and sun rays. A pair of pied oyster-catchers scuttling along the beach.

 

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Then back up the steps into a diagonal sky, and breakfast at Blue Earth with a most beloved senior granddaughter. So begins a 74th year.