Eurobodalla beaches: Barlings Beach

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Barlings Beach

What makes this beach different from all the other beaches I’ve featured in the ongoing project to visit all the beaches in my shire? If I can’t answer that question, and it’s not an easy one, I might as well stop the series now.

For a start, it faces east-west, instead of north-south which is the orientation I’ve come to expect of my beaches. On my reckoning, this means that the sun won’t rise over the sea, a disorienting fact on this stretch of the east coast. The stubby island just offshore with a rakish hat of trees is to the south; and the vista to Melville Point, a pale line of mountains, and a receding coastline, cove after cove, is to the west.

The beach is inhabited on this dull Sunday morning – people rock-hopping and sliding into a rockpool for a dip; walking their dog and their children along the sand; pitching a green and blue beach tent to keep off the recalcitrant sun; or, in our case, scrutinising rock patterns and the long flattish platform stretching into the sea; and seeking folds wherever they might be found. Or not.

The beaches are varied: tiny pebbles on the way to becoming black sand; larger rounded rocklets interspersed with larger shells than I’m used to; occasional narrow patches of sand with a backdrop of spindly bush, or cliffs with rock sheering off.

The colours are a rocky rainbow – many shades of grey, slate, ochre, cream, écru, tan, pink, pale crimson, maroon, palest blue -and an infinity of patterns: intersecting lines, meanders, scribbles, waves, veins, splotches.

A man-made rock-and-concrete pathway insinuates its substantial way across pebbly beaches, and masquerades as a rather peculiar dyke. We speculate about its date and its reason for being. It stretches for at least 500 metres and there is a serious amount of concrete, inlaid with quite substantial chunks of endemic rock: the rusty remains of reinforcement leach a pinky-apricot sunset into some of the rockpools. A few beaches up there is a WW2 concrete bunker: maybe there’s a connection.

This is a superficial view of Barlings Beach, merely what’s apparent to my aesthetic eye. There is far more in this strip of coastline than appears after a 2-hour scrutiny. For one thing, there’s a strong Aboriginal presence, which I learn about thanks to a local council site, (which includes the plan below) Most of the oral history is from the 1960s, stories mainly from members of the Nye family (one of whom was my daughter’s good friend at school), but it reflects traditions going back many, many generations.

In the 1960s Symalene Nye and her family lived at The Corner, near where the track leads down to the beach, in a humpy made up of an army tent, blankets and corrugated iron. She did the first phase of her washing in the creek and then boiled the clothes in rinso and pegged them out on a line of 8-gauge wire. She cooked on a stove of stone with a cast iron chimney: apple pies and stewed, braised, stuffed and baked rabbits. There were plenty of snacks close by: prickly pear, blackberries, red gooseberries and pigface. If you got thirsty you could chew casuarina seeds.

It was the job of the men and the boys to catch the mullet and tailor she salted. In the centre of the beach was a lookout where handsignals were used to show the whereabouts of the fish. Older men would carry boys across the channel to the deep hole near the island where bream and blackfish were trapped as the tide went out, and where they fished by kerosene light at midnight. The island was a place of significance for men, the place of origin of Lady Merrima, the Black Swan.

The grassland behind the beach was used as an airstrip for a fish-spotting plane. A message was dropped with the whereabouts in a sunshine milk can if landing was tricky. The same area was burnt to attract rabbits: one day, seven men caught 156 pairs which they sold to the CSIRO, the Australian government’s scientific research agency.

Just behind the fishing lookout were grounds used for traditional fighting between the Braidwood and the Moruya / Tomakin tribes. A Bora Ring somewhere along the Tomakin road is documented in reports held by the shire council.

Then, since I want to travel back even further to the Ordovician period somewhere around 450 million years ago, I return to my guide, Natalie Stokes, via her thesis, which I’ve used before when I wanted to find out about the Bogolo Formation, and from which I snaffle the geological map below.

This time, she offers me, not only a detailed description of the characteristics of ten distinct rock units, but colour coded plans, measurements, and compass directions. I’m comforted by mention of “outcrops”: I think I know what an outcrop is. I’m less comforted by colours: I know from experience how hard it is to name a colour accurately in a way that someone else will recognise. However I’m hopeful that on my next visit I’ll be able to orient myself, courtesy of the massive greenstone outcrop, ten metres wide. From there, I should be able, with patience and discussion with J, to locate black mudstone; a mixture of brown mudstone and bedded chert; a melange of black mudstone, quartz sandstone, and greenstone; a zone of intermingled turbidites, greenstone and chert; a scattering of disrupted chert outcrops; interbedded lithic sandstone and mudstone; clay-rich siliceous mudstone (grey-yellowish); outcrops of iron rich mudstone; and outcrops of lithic sandy-mudstone. Plenty of reassuring “outcrops” in this list!

Maybe I’m beginning to shape a plan towards geological understanding. First I visit a site and poke around. Then I read what I can find and try and connect it to what I’ve seen, hoping for maps and diagrams and measurements and colours. Then I return to the site with a clear list called “What I’m looking for”, a compass, a tape measure and the expectation that J will have a better understanding than me.

Hotchpotch 12

Some of these photos are harvested from morning mini-walks around Potato Point and in the bush, often after rain …

Some are miscellanea from beach prowls … or from a joy flight …

One is the lomatia along my front fence …

The last one just tickled my fancy …

It

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observations

This post, a while in the making, was inspired by icelandpenny who does such things so wonderfully. In reply to my comment on a post of hers, she said Go and settle in somewhere delightful & just see what happens … A reversal of the usual, eh? Let it come to us, instead of rushing around looking for “it.”

The doctor’s waiting room

I sit opposite a balding man with gold-rimmed spectacles, firmly and neatly reposing on his nose. Two deep lines mark his face, one extending down from his nose, one from his mouth. He wears cargo pants, a neat dark speckled shirt, and black crocs and socks. He is semi-reclining, reading a magazine held out in front of him, making a V with his reclining body. His clip-on glasses case is on the chair next to him. He will not forget it when he’s called. He sits quite still, absorbed in Woman’s Day. The main headline on the cover reads 13 dirty sex exposés.
A young couple come in. He saunters, hands in the pockets of his board shorts, bare feet, a long T-shirt which reads “Tuross Heads flathead tournament 2015.”  She is large with a long fair ponytail, a floating paisley shirt, black leggings that mould themselves around her calfs, and thongs. As they wait to check in they each stand on one foot, the other curled around the ankle. They move to a seat, he lifting his shirt to scratch his back, she pulling out the mobile phone. He puts his head lightly on her shoulder to read the message and then inserts parallel fingers up his nostril to extract something that he then examines.

Two workmen approach the desk with a 2-metre plank. The older one wears a faded pinkish work shirt and well-worn trousers: the younger one, wild-bearded, dread-locked, has a much newer bright yellow shirt and a neat tool belt around his waist. They too stand on one foot, as they bend to assess the level of the timber, armed with a steel ruler and a red biro, walking up and down along the plank scrutinising it.

The half-head of the receptionist is visible above the desk. Suddenly she stands up and moves behind a half wall, emerging with a pot containing a tall pinky-purple hollyhock, which she takes out to the courtyard, picking up a fallen flower as she returns to her desk.

Rain

It’s been a long time coming, that slanting sound of rain. It pops down onto the clear deck tabletop and bounces back out of the circles of ripples. Things form straight vertical lines: the drips from the guttering, the plants in the garden box refreshed after long dry. Straight horizontal lines – the drops on the clotheshorse, along the thin branches of the hakea. Things droop: whole branches, the slightly curly leaves of the pittosporum funnelling the raindrops to the ground

The dog crouches reluctant under the table when it’s walk time. If H gets him outside he hunches down and shakes his head. I relish the excuse not to walk the walk of duty, although a little bit of rain would hardly hurt.

The puddle at the front gate catches the light and draws birds avid for easy drinking. The callistemon and the deck rails are reflected in the sheen of the sheet of water settled on the verandah planks.

In the night thunder crashes, lightning makes Zorro slashes in the darkness.

The bakery

The words of my order are drowned in the whirr of the machine slicing bread. The operator, short with neat greying hair, stares at the brick wall, reaches automatically for the plastic bag, feeds the sliced loaf into it, and places the next loaf ready. A young woman in black walks purposefully to the drinks refrigerator and releases a 2 litre carton of milk. A bulky middle-aged workman in untidy shorts and worn mustard-coloured boots with the laces tied in a slovenly knot in the second-top hole says, after considering the glass case of cakes for a while,  “Two custard tarts please” and carries the white paper bag out to his white ute. A young man, hair shaved to above his ears, specs hooked around his neck like a necklace asks for a loaf of brown in a barely audible voice.

After a brief lull, they come in thick and fast. A dreadlocked workman wearing a Vigden’s Electrical workshirt,  3-day stubble and a brown cap picks up his rockcake in a flat paper bag. A tall woman, well-dressed, pink sunnies perched on the top of her head, fine silver chain dangling between her breasts, buys pink juice. She is so tall the woman with the greying hair has to crane upwards to meet her eyes, as they make arrangements to meet later “if you’ve still got the energy.”

Another lull. The banners and balloons in the used car sales yard move in the stiffening breeze, and the sluggish traffic mutters by on the highway.

The woman from the fruit and veggie shop, crisp in green shorts and top, buys a bag of spinach and feta rolls; the butcher who just sold me a bag of dog bones comes in in his blue and white striped apron for chocolate milk and a pizza. A schoolboy with floppy curly hair leaves his backpack and folder outside and buys sausage rolls.

It’s now 10 am and a stooped woman, well-known to the shop assistants, enters. Her sagging bag is hoiked over her shoulder and rides on her stoop. Her thin hair is combed back and her glasses are round. She chats familiarly to the women behind the counter, and settles down with cheesecake with passion fruit topping, a treat after a morning’s shopping.

The tables are filling up and it’s time for me to stop spying on innocent shoppers and go and do my own shopping.

As I write I wonder. I would hesitate to photograph these people, and yet I am quite happy to sit here appropriating their images in words. Is there a difference? I wonder!

Christmas Day in photos

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Christmas Day PotatoPoint-style

Assessing the surf

Kayaking the creek

It’s a dog’s life

Mother – son trial of strength

My entertainment

Into the wilderness

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4WD, Bendethera

A few weeks ago we flew over the wilderness to the west of home: a few days ago we drove out into it, a glorious day of 4WDriving in the capable hands of our Queensland son. We left the highway just north of Bodalla and bored 70 kilometres into magnificent country where we saw not another soul.

Our first stop was familiar. I’ve been to Bood-jarn, which I’ve always known as Hanging Mountain, a number of times: it’s close to the limit of the capacity of my small cars. A short track led through eucalypts, grass trees, white tea tree (unidentified species), red bell flowers (Epacris impressa) and pink trigger plants, to a lookout where we experienced that lovely clean palpability of mountain air, and a view out over ridge after heavily treed ridge. On the horizon, Gulaga snuggled under her possum skin cloak of clouds.

Since my last visit, they’ve installed a railing and information panels telling the Aboriginal story, and vandals have had time to saw off a few of them. Three remained. One told how in the Great Flood the Ancestral Being turned some humans into birds – gannets, snipe, cormorants and darters – who could dive deep, rescue people drowning and take them to safety in high places. One spoke of a network of “bush highways” leading to ceremonial and learning places, campsites, and places for gathering medicinal herbs, bush food and materials for tools and weapons. It also told of beacons lit to guide travellers, signal ceremonies, and ask permission to enter tribal territories. The third one focused on lighting and managing the beacons: the twirling of a stick in fibrous material to start the fire with leaf litter and add it to the fire stack; and then the choice of wood to create different colours and density to create a vocabulary of signalling.

After Bood-jarn we began the serious business of descent, 800 metres down down down into Bendethera Valley – except when we were mounting substantial anti-erosion humps. The bush was close to the road, and the hillside dropped away very steeply into rugged gullies through tall tree ferns. Occasionally there was a glimpse out to the ocean, and we were accompanied by a conical mountain we struggled to name as we lost orientation to familiar places. I found it harder and harder to believe that J drove a beat-up Mazda sedan down here once, and that Rose and Marcin cycled here before their marathon from Tokyo to Warsaw.

Eventually we reached the valley and the first of the river crossings, which is where the Mazda adventure ended all those years ago. We however, powered through, this one and a bit more carefully the second one, using a bypass to avoid a deep hole and large boulders with scrape marks where the less cautious had bottomed out.

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Suddenly we were in a capacious grassy valley, home to multitudes of kangaroos who eyed us off calmly. It was campers’ paradise – lots of secluded spots down by the Deua River or Con Creek or Little Con Creek. Katie sat on the window ledge photographing with the new go-pro camera.

Everything looked relaxing and peaceful and easy, until we started reading the information panels. The George family settled here in the 1860s after Joseph George came across the valley when he was searching for a stolen horse. He and his wife, Mary, were tough. They had fifteen children: the midwife, Suzanne Lavis, a surname that still thrives around home, came from Moruya to live with the family at lying-in time, leaving her own family to do so. The information panel at the grave of one son included an ominous note that the mortality rate for children at the time was one in five.

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On a hillside were the remains of a substantial oven, the front for baking bread, the back for scalding pigs. There were still traces of water races that allowed gravity-feed watering of crops. As erstwhile market gardeners we were in awe of the enterprise in this distant valley, and then realised that there was a market for vegetables, bacon and turkeys waiting on the goldfields of Araluen and Nerrigundah, although the journey up out of the valley still looked daunting. Story goes corn was dribbled from a bag to encourage turkeys to walk to market.

There is no escaping geology. The limestone caves in the valley indicated that this was once (430MYA) a shallow sea-bed. It was fifteen years before Benjamin George, one of the sons of Mary and Joseph, came across the caves (maybe not the son whose father set his broken leg and left him to recover in a lean-to built round him, bringing him food for two weeks until he could stagger home again.) People were so interested in strange landforms I. The late 1800s that an 800 hectare caves reserve was established. A hundred people a year came into the valley on horseback; and walkways, stairs, ladders and ropes were installed in the caves to help them explore.

We set off along a grassy track beside the creek towards the caves, ears drilled by the sound of cicadas which drowned out the gurgling of water. At the first crossing Katie found me a sturdy stick and offered her youthful arm as I stepped from rock to wobbly rock without wetting my shoes. She and my son do this stuff barefooted and surefooted. The track was edged with maiden hair and herringbone ferns, and suddenly a tall dark pink hyacinth orchid. We crossed the creek three more times, and just reached the point where there were signs of limestone accretions on the rocks when J’s leg began to object. Not the caves today. I wasn’t upset: an 8 km return journey in the heat of the afternoon wasn’t inviting, especially when the incentive was narrow holes to crawl through and dark places full of bat-shit. On the return walk we spotted the silvery leaves of the Bendethera wattle, a species that grows only here.

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We returned to the noble car that had got us to this splendid place, circled the open area, saw a wild pig dash across the road behind us, and crossed a few more creeks, J a tad anxious about big boulders. Our last stop was a deep swimming hole where everyone else submerged and I wimped out. I swore an oath: Never again will I sit on the bank while every one else frolics.

The climb out of the valley was steep and bone-shaking. As we approached Bood-jarn mist descended and swirled briefly around the tops of the trees. When we rejoined the highway at 4 o’clock it felt like an alien world.

The next day, Katie’s sister went out to Bendethera to camp for a few nights, and found the whole area along creeks and rivers packed with holiday makers.

Attribution: The frog and the ingenious bird’s nest with lid were i-photographed by Stephen Moore and used with permission

PS and NB: The next day I plunged at dusk into the river near home.

Christmas wishes

Whatever you celebrate at Christmas. However you celebrate. Whenever you celebrate. Whoever you celebrate with.

May your celebration be joyful, and rich in pleasures that suit you best.

Light-catching

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evening light, misty light, morning light

I’ve been hunting for a title for this post for a while. Finally, in the darkness of Narooma Kinema, watching Loving Vincent, I was given “light-catching” – a quote from Van Gogh, master of light, although his painting was far more textured than my photos.

So many different lights.

Early morning light just before sunrise, a kind of apricot glow.

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Light on a cloudy morning with the fingers of god combing the clouds.

Light through the mist on an early bush morning.

Light on a grey day over the sea.

Evening light, drawn down into a lagoon.

RegularRandom: 5 minutes with blueberry ash

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blueberry ash, RegularRandom

When I moved into my Potato Point house it had a front lawn surrounded by diosmas, and a military line of callistemon along the fence. J was looking for somewhere to indulge a rainforest phase and we needed to hide the all-night lights in the garden next door, so he planted a mini rainforest in my front yard. Elaeocarpus reticulatus (aka blueberry ash – my preferred name -lily of the valley tree, blue olive-berry, scrub ash, ash quandong , and if you absolutely must, fairy petticoats) was one of these trees. They now intermingle with the callistemon and the myrtles along the side fence, and have taken up residence along the front. Because it’s so crowded, they don’t achieve the rather splendid shape of a mature one in the swampy bush behind Potato Point beach, which was where J collected some of the seeds.

When I walked to my front gate in late spring I was accompanied by the smell of licorice. It took me a while to trace it to those raggedy fringed flowers, hanging in racemes, snuggling in amongst their toothed glossy leaves. When I structured the photos in Snapseed, it became obvious why they are called “reticulatus”: the veins in the leaf spread like a net.

The pleasures didn’t end when the flowers faded and fell. First I had a white petal carpet under the trees along the drive, like feldspar in granite, and soon, when the berries form, the pink and creamy- white of the flowers will be replaced by sky-blue globular drupes enclosing the recalcitrant seed. I don’t have baby blueberry ashes popping up all over my garden because the seeds are hard to germinate: sometimes they go to sleep for twenty years, waiting for fire or a good soaking to wake them up. J tried smashing them and soaking them in acid to hurry them along, but that didn’t work.

Most of my trees have white flowers, but there is one pink one.

This week in RegularRandom, DJ features delicate baubles, her own reflection, and a very elegant minimalist Christmas tree. I try to match at least delicacy, and the pink flower is specially for her.

Happy birthday! You’re 5 today

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5th birthday

Today my beloved Polish grandchildren turn an unbelievable 5. They are long and lean and fascinated by rockets and in Maja’s case her ability to “make a bridge” with her body: Jaś says “I can’t do that because my head’s too big.” Skyping has been my only contact since March. Sometimes we connect. Sometimes we don’t. Maja greeted us on one call, saying: “Not them again.” One Skype we didn’t see them at all because there was a man in the kitchen doing something with wires in the wall who plainly gazumphed Babi and Dziadek. For a while Maja only communicated via Mummy, but the last few times she’s talked directly to us. Jaś began by chatting away, but now disappears, once he’s finished breakfast. One session Maja refused outright to pay us any attention at all, and then emailed us a message.

What a journey it is birth to 5!

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RegularRandom: 5 minutes with a rainbow lorikeet

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rainbow lorikeet, RegularRandom

It’s 5.30 am and I’m off for my first mini-walk of the day. I’m grumpy and unwilling. I bop up and down stairs three times, delaying departure. The last bop is to pick up my camera, thinking “I won’t see anything to photograph, but just in case.”

There’s no sign of recent rain, except the clacking and shrilling of frogs in the swampy land near the creek, and the sky is clear and pink. The surf is up and the waves roll and crash. I head up Short Street, past my favourite Potato Point house to the seat near the wooden staircase, overlooking Jemisons beach. At the south end the waves erupt massively against the rocks, and the sun makes a blinding path across the sea.

Suddenly I’m joined by a rainbow lorikeet. It perches on the stair rail. It comes over to the bench. It hops towards me, blue head, orange chest, green wings, and beady red eyes. It explores the planks of the bench, has an tentative chew, and hops closer, almost to my hand, conversing in lorikeet all the time. It lands on my jacket, its blue almost the same colour, and then my shoulder. We eyeball each other briefly. Having finished assessing me, it takes up residence on my head.

Then a flash of rainbow and it’s off to delight someone else.

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I’ll keep my distance, and suss you out first.

Mmm. You look OK. Maybe I’ll join you on the bench. But don’t expect too much. I’m a bit shy.

Shyness butters no parsnips. I’ll edge a bit close and see what happens.

OK. No harm done. A bit closer. Your hand’s probably harmless, but I won’t actually hop on it.

That’s as close as I’ll go down here. I’ll hop a bit higher. But don’t think you’ve got me tamed.

Now maybe it’s time to put my best face forward. This?

Or this?

Ot this …?

Enough fiddling around. You’re harmless. I’ll hop onto your arm. Your jacket is a welcoming colour. And now for the final act of daring. Onto your head. That’ll surprise you!

This is my contribution to RegularRandom. This week DJ photographs chocolates, arranging them beautifully, against a beautifully considered background.