Eurobodalla beaches: Tomakin

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Tomakin

Anyone watching that day would have seen this.

A large woman, probably in her seventies made a beeline, as old women do, for the toilets. She paused briefly to take in the mosaic murals. You could almost see her thinking “Art on public conveniences. I can’t quite figure this out. When did this habit begin? Beats graffiti, anyway.”

She returned to the car, pulled out a bag and proceeded to picnic at the steel bench-and-table-in-one, where the petals of the tea-tree drifted down. A sandwich, tea from a thermos, and strawberries sliced in half. She obviously knows that someone’s been inserting needles in supermarket strawberries

Lunch finished. There she goes: she idled back to the car, grabbed hat and camera, and paused at the panel which gave a history of the name Tomakin, and marked sites of historical interest. Obviously a consumer of information. But then people of her generation often are.

She paused again, probably wondering which way to go. She chose a sandy track winding through the bush. The onlooker knows the beach well and thinks “She won’t get far that way. The landcare group’s been busy with regen, and they’ve fenced off the dunes to make sure it takes. I reckon she’ll have a quick look at the river, across to the mangroves, and then she’ll take the stairs down to the beach.”

Sure enough she soon appeared on the sand, heading south. She was a bit of a nuisance actually. A woman was obviously trying to train her puppy, but this lumbering figure was tempting and he kept running back to leap up at her. The owner began to jog to remove this temptation.

The woman walked on in a way that seemed to be choreographed by her camera, pirouetting around to photograph the beach both ways, swooping low to the sand (a leaf? a shell?), pausing to look out to sea and at the low rocky island.

She reached the river mouth and suddenly evinced uncertainty. It was easy to see why. She was wondering whether she could return to her car along the river.

This uncertainty remained for the next half hour. She was still hesitant as she rounded the bend and looked across the red buoy to the settlement, but she was apparently reassured by the firmness and width of the sandy stretch. However the camera hung unused around her neck.

Aha. She made a wrong decision there. No use heading into the bush. No real tracks there, and no easy way back across the dunes to the beach. You could tell she was thinking “Snakes. Ticks. Twisted ankle” as she gingerly picked her way back to the sand. Then you could almost see the wheels of her mind turning as she looked down. “Paw prints. The woman and her dog came this way. And they haven’t come back.” And on she went.

The strip of sand became narrower. Now she had to move the branches back, clamber over tree roots onto higher ground, bum it back down again. She should be over her worry now – she can surely see the boat ramp near the car park from there. Besides there’s a sandy track soon that’ll bring her up to to the top of the dunes, but she can’t know that.”

She spotted it and laboured her way up, using hands the way old people do. Once, nimble legs would’ve been enough.

She dropped back onto the beach, eyes drawn to the low tongue of rock between Tomakin Beach and Tomakin Cove. She seemed to be paying inordinate attention to Melville Headland: surely she couldn’t know anything about its geological significance. She doesn’t look the type.

She headed for the rocks and pottered around there briefly, showing no particular interest – not an amateur geologist then.

Just an old woman getting a beach fix on a beautiful sunny spring day.

Eurobodalla beaches: around Tuross

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Coila Bar, Coila Lake, David Henry Blake, pine trees, Plantation Beach north, Plantation Beach south

Another glorious winter Sunday, J in search of geological certainties, specifically the identification of gabbro-diorite, I idling along companionably. While he chips at boulders between Coila Lake and the beach with his geological hammer, I walk the edge of the lake, drawing in the mountains in the distance; a pair of plump pied oyster catchers; prickly sand plants, red and green succulents, and thin straps of dried weed; and its slightly mucky edge with a thick outline of foam; . I note a sign pointing to the Dreaming Track and conceive a future walk along the 5 kilometres to Bingie Headland.

Then we head, of course, for more rocks, along the sand bar, which has already taken the print of many feet, avian and human. Coila Lake is an ICOLL (Intermittently Closed and Open Lakes and Lagoons), like many along this coast. It’s astonishing to think that not all that long ago (and I’m not talking geological time) the sea was rushing into the lake and that the monster sandbar has formed again since then.

Shells gleam in heaps, thicker than last week’s scattering on a beach south of here, which I claimed then to be unique.

I sit on a convenient rock, feet dangling, and note the patterns: plaits, circles, square boxes, bubbles, clefts, intrusions. and the blue sea behind..

Tuross is noted for its Norfolk pines, and we walk through a grove of them, past a war memorial and the inevitable challenged lone pine from Gallipoli, that foundation place of an Australian myth. I no longer regard the pines as invaders: pollen analysis identifies their presence in Gondwana rainforest, as it adapted to a drying-out climate.

We descend onto the rocks of Plantation Beach, through grass and along sandy pathways and look down the coast to the pine trees of Potato Point, Gulaga lounging on the horizon. The rocks here, whatever they’re made of, have straight lines of pinkish rhyolite striping through, straight and parallel. We have been preceded by a professional geologist, David Blake who died in a cycling accident after a stellar career investigating rocks in Iceland, Canada, Papua New Guinea, and central and northern Australia. His memorial plaque is accompanied by a ten cent piece, a geologist’s way of identifying scale.

Then it’s back to Coila Lake, a bit further round the shoreline, where you can look towards the sandbar where this morning’s adventure began.

Eurobodalla beaches: from Tilba Cemetery towards 1080

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rocks, sea, Tilba beach north to 1080

Returning to Australian weekends is easy, in winter sunshine before the wind picks up. We drive the new car out along the spur towards Tilba Cemetery, and suddenly the Pacific Ocean sprawls before us. A sandy track leads us down to a wide beach, backed by grassy dunes, and, towering behind farmland, under bright clouds, sacred Gulaga.

The beach is distinctive. The tideline is marked by lines of small shells in curves and points, depending on the whim of the retreating sea.

The sea is smooth, lazy waves plopping on the sand and splashing laconically.

I’m fascinated by horizontality. J is far ahead as I snap snap snap, his leg functioning well again, the rocks at the far end of the beach dragging him along by his geological curiosity. I’m not focused on geology, just on the feel of Australian sand and wind and sun. I’ve lost any knack I had of geological analytics in my seven weeks in Warsaw. I have to relearn diorite, and … what on earth were the other -ites?

There are no rocks till we approach the northern end and then sudden outcrops and bluffs appear.

I’m easily pleased by sand and rock gardens; rock patterns; and traces of attempted ownership.

We sit companionably for a while in the sun, sheltered by the rocks from the wind.

As we head back, a flock of tiny birds announce their presence by mazes of claw-prints, and then appear, scurry-pause-scurry, shadows and minute sand-spurts in tow.

We return to the car up a different track, through a gate and onto a bare grassy hillside capped by the cemetery

Rocks, ceremony and art

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“Restless Earth” exhibition, Camel Rock, Murunna Headland, Spiral Gallery

We’ve written for three or four hours – after all that is the designated purpose of our week together, me and a very special friend – before we set off to visit a geriatric who raises the bar of longevity and survival extraordinarily high. Camel Rock, so named by the whitefellas, has been around, one way and another, for 450 million years.

Baked, squeezed, buried, exhumed and eroded

It’s had a rough time of it and bears the marks of its history, as do all old things. It was birthed when an avalanche roared down over the continental shelf, carrying with it broken-down rock ranging from boulders to minute grains, which settled into layers on the bottom of the sea. Over the millennia they have been baked, squeezed, buried, exhumed and eroded to become today’s rockscape. Undulations in the fine layers at the top of each bed record the ripples as the flow comes to rest. Often turbidite beds are stacked on top of each other by many undersea avalanches covering vast periods of time. As you can imagine rocks now are often highly deformed by all this pressure.

Corroboree, ceremony, trade

More recently, the area around Camel Rock became a sacred Aboriginal site. People from up and down the coast and from the Monaro gathered on Murunna Headland above the Rock for corroboree, the last time as recently as the 1930s. Tools were traded and food from ocean, estuary, lake and river shared. A freshwater hole at the base of the southern side of Murunna was a sacred place for women. The head of a woman in the rock was seen as warning of a dangerous rip.

“Restless earth”

We were drawn to visit Camel Rock as a companion piece to an exhibition at the Spiral Gallery in Bega. The title of the exhibition is part of a quote from Professor Brian Cox: “Earth is our ancestor. The restless earth is your creator.” Joy Georgeson’s ceramic hollow hand-built sculptures, decorated with engobes, oxides and glazes, were inspired by the geology and biology of Camel Rock, and Ivana Gattegno‘s art, acrylic, and black and white charcoal, by the landscape around Gulaga and Mimosa Rocks. You may recognise a pile of stones and the offshore rock in the second image from a recent post.

Never the same place twice: Pooles to 1080

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Bruce Leaver, hornfels, lava, Pooles to 1080, rhyolite

Once upon a time, not so long ago, we walked from Pooles to 1080. “Around three headlands, through two pebbly coves, over one long-grass rock bypass, past five large orange dykes, between untidy masses of black lava long since solidified, and onto parallel ridges … Rockface laminated in wavy lines.” That’s how I described it then, with a few vague technical geological terms, dyke and lava, thrown in.

Since then, we’ve been tutored, under the auspices of U3A Bermagui, by Bruce Leaver, a passionate geologist. He gave us an early morning insight into deep time, explaining the origins of all the landmarks we could see. Not only that, but he had rocks on the table which he named and explained. J scrutinised them intently; read and reread Leaver’s lucid notes; and collected and classified pebbles from nearby Hayward’s Beach. Then we were ready to revisit the track from 1080 to Pooles, armed with a bit of knowledge, a geological hammer and a collecting bag.

What were we looking for? The wavy lines that indicate hornfels; the solidified lava; the dykes of intruded rhyolite.

Hornfels first. It’s the result of a meeting between a clay-rich rock and a hot igneous body: a connection that, like all relationships, alters the original rock. ID is still slightly tentative: none of the Google images I found looked anything like this.

Then lava, easily recognised – deep black, sometimes pitted, sometimes with flow marks still visible, sometimes smooth like black marble. It derives from the Cretaceous period, somewhere between 135 and 65 million years ago, and there it is still, squatting or flowing solidly, unmistakably black and unmistakably lava.

Finally, and more doubtfully, rhyolite (is it?) forming dykes, in one place “a vertically oriented sheet of light-coloured igneous material sitting starkly in the old shale rocks” as described by Leaver. Dykes are intruders, pushing their way through other rock and marching in a straightish line across the rockscape.

That’s some sort of progress towards geological understanding. At least we’re on the way to mastering the naming of parts. J has a bag of samples to split, and an urge to master the measuring of specific gravity, which, done precisely, gives a precise rock ID.

But for me there’s more to the beaches than geological understanding . There’s the moody sky with faint wave-splash and reflections in the passage of tide.

There’s jetsam, sometimes easily recognisable, sometimes a mystery, at least to this landlubber.

There are rock patterns (possibly hornfels, definitely aesthetically pleasing); the residue of retreating waves; rock-clingers; and a cuttlefish with a touch of pink dawn.

Behind all this Mother Gulaga lounges – Mother Gulaga, or, speaking geologically, a 98 million year old intrusion into the side of a massive strato volcano, a volcano so immense it was visible from as far away as Wollongong and spread over Cobargo, Tanja and Narooma.

For Aboriginal oral histories of connection to this part of country, see here.

Wordless walk: 1080 to Tilba headland

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flotsam, lava, Tilba Lake

Eurobodalla beaches: Dalmeny / Brou / Brush

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Aboriginal memories, coloured cliffs, Dalmeny / Brou / Brush

Between Potato Point and Dalmeny is one of the longest beaches in the shire, the 7km long Dalmeny / Brou / Brush Beach, right on our doorstep, perfect for avoiding long stretches of the Christmas – New Year highway, and for providing J with a long walk on therapeutic sand.

On Saturday we park at Dalmeny, which is busy with tourists. In the camping area overlooking the beach men lounge in chairs, wearing only shorts, beer in one hand, mobile phone in the other. The lake crossing looks easy so we pad barefooted along grass to the stairs. We’re suddenly confronted by rocks, some home to oyster shells, and then a crossing with deep sand, in which I sink up to my knees. Since I’m carrying camera and shoulder bag, I seek J’s hand for balance, and we’re suddenly the recipients of “help the geriatrics” kindness. On the beach there are flags, unusual on our beaches, and a lifesaver’s kayak lying ready. People lounge about reading and acquiring skin cancer. Soon we’re past the crowds, walking an empty expanse of sand, at the other end of which we can see the Norfolk pines on the headland at Potato Point. I don’t take many photos, and post-process them in search of moodiness.

If you’re interested in Aboriginal memories of camping around the lake that enters the sea, the one that swallowed me up to my knee, read here.

On Sunday we decide to access the beach from the centre. We take the turnoff to Brou tip, and continue past it through gravel bed country and over savage corrugations which, combined with my driving, shake the bejesus out of the car. We pass the turnoff to Brou Lake and the spotted gum camping area, and find ourselves at the place where I used to picnic and explore on the way home from volunteering at Little Yuin preschool. At the foot of the stairs are creamy smooth rocks surrounded by pools of water, residue of the sea.

Despite a background hint of pink and orange, this does nothing to prepare us for the shock of colour that greets us as we head north.

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This spectacular cliffage is 3 km from home if you walk along the beach, and yet “we’ve never seen it before”. This is becoming something of a refrain.

For Aboriginal memories of camping near Brou Lake, just north of where our stroll ended you can read this.

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.

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.

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.