Eurobodalla beaches: Wallaga Beach

Tags

Fiona Ross, friends, rockface, sunset, Tony McManus, Wallaga Beach

With thanks to Kate who provided the many pleasures of this day.

It’s a perfect winter’s day, warm in the sun but a definite chill out of it. I meet my friend at the highway turnoff near Central Tilba, and head through farmland following signs to the cemetery, two enclosures on an empty hillside. We ramble round the one nearest the sea, noting local names; the age demographics of the dead; and the devotion of  descendants who mark unmarked graves after locating them with cemetery records. Then we settle on a substantial and comfortable wooden bench amongst the graves to enjoy our picnic lunch.

A sandy track leads through dune growth to the beach. A lagoon reaches out from the sand towards majestic Mother Gulaga. 

We skirt the water, amongst many footprints, human, dog and bird, and head towards the low cliffs on the south end of the part of the beach we can see. The beach actually stretches for five kilometres, but the tide interferes with any plans we don’t have to walk the length of it. The beach tilts towards the water, and is quite heavy going for someone who only likes the taut sand of low tide. However, I trudge my way along, stopping for desultory conversation with my companion.

I reach the rocks, and forget the human as I and my camera converse with them, different yet again from others I’ve seen along my coastline. The cliffs are listing under the impact of past – long past – upheavals. 

The rock face below the cliffs has the appearance of bulbous blocks stacked neatly – or is it rounded tesselations? – and broken occasionally by diagonal lines and mini-gardens.

In other places the rock forms tiny caves with stalactites, or elegant swathes.

Then there are the blue rocks: some with stripes, others with more regular geometric shapes.

There is also honeycombing and wandering inserts, such as I’ve seen in slightly different forms elsewhere.

I acquire delusion of grandeur and decide I’ll play the role of a seismic shift and photographically tilt the rocks. Such power!

A lone seagull with a limp takes a fancy to us and follows us back along the beach, hoping for who knows what. Out at sea a faint haze resolves itself into a whale blow, and we pause to track and capture it as it moves slowly north. The sun is speeding down the sky, cars are spilling out dogs eager for an afternoon run, and we make our way to Central Tilba (remember it, Jude?) for a cuppa. The café clocks our age, and the music changes to the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel and Elvis.

Wallaga Lake, south of the beach we’ve just walked along, is fading to pink in the late afternoon light. 

This charmed day ends with a concert hosted by the Yuin Folk Club in Cobargo. Fiona Ross, singer of Scottish folk songs, has a voice unlike any I’ve heard before, and entertains us with an account of the unremittingly lugubrious nature of the songs she sings: you meet a girl and you die, or your mother puts a curse on you, or (less direly) the girl you want marries someone else.

However it is Tony McManus the guitar player who makes my evening. He is one of those musicians who is inseparable from his instrument. The music flows as the fingers move, and when he and his steel guitar play his arrangement of Sati my enchantment reaches its peak. It doesn’t hurt that his patter is laconic and amusing, but if you follow the link and just want the music it begins at 3.20. 

And so to Kate’s place, and the most comfortable bed I have ever slept in.

Eurobodalla Beaches: Billy’s Beach

Tags

Billy's Beach, rockpools, rocks

To visit most beaches, I just hop out of the car and step pretty well straight down onto the sand. This time I walk through a vast bush camping area shaded by spotted gums and graceful red-barked mahogany, and brightened by the jewelled fruit on pittosporums. Some of the campsites are on the edge of the cliff, and I can feel a camping urge coming on me. The air is warm-crisp. I’m delighted to be walking through bush and predisposed for love.

Enticing tracks take me right to the edge, looking out over unexpectedly rugged rocks to the blue ocean, rock islands and strips of distant sand.

I walk somewhat gingerly along the rocks and find myself looking down into a most unexpected gorge, steeper and deeper than the photo shows. The auguries for love are looking good: surprise is an aphrodisiac.

I reach the end of the camping area and find myself entering Eurobodalla National Park, the same park that surrounds me at Potato Point – a long, reclaimed, “non-contiguous” strip stretching down the coast from Moruya Heads to Tilba Tilba Lake. I encounter two families with small children, reminding me that Billy’s is billed as child friendly. And then there it is …

… a small serene beach with a view out to Mother Gulaga’s son, Baranguba. I don’t hesitate. I head for the sunny end, wondering what it will offer me. Underfoot is the scrunch of large grey pebbles and shells. My first impression is of rather undistinguished grey rock, creating uninteresting rock pools. The possibility of love retreats.

And then my eyes are opened, suddenly, as they often are in love affairs. They’re drawn to large rock faces, rather than close up patches. Everything is on a grand scale.

Already smitten, I stroll 200 metres along the beach to the other end, anticipating further delights and I am not disappointed. Other people have been here before me, delineating the meandering lines in the rock with white pebbles. The cliffs tilt and present a range of colours and patterns. The rockpools are vivid.

I realise I’m more than smitten. I’m deeply in love. I look back along the beach and out beyond a rocky outcrop to the sea. I’d stay here in solitude, soaking up the sun, but I’m meeting a gang of friends from my children’s childhood. Love has to give way to friendship, even fresh love. I walk past a huge dune of gravel, back to the wooden stairs, where I sit briefly, revelling in a new amour.

***********************************************

I’m prepared to share my new love with special people, bits of it at least, this time specifically Gilly who has shown an interest in plants and their foothold in rock. For you, my friend.

Eurobodalla beaches: Mystery Bay kink zone

Tags

kink zone, Mystery Bay

This post acknowledges my dentist who not only does pro bono dentistry in places like Nepal and East Timor, but is also on a mission to visit all the Eurobodalla beaches. We’re both on about 30, but her acquaintance includes unusual beach pastimes like swimming and snorkelling. Thank you Charmaine for making a visit to the dentist a pleasure (almost).

There are stories here at Mystery Bay: the mystery that gave it its name and the geological story behind its kinks.

The mystery story is easy to track down. In 1880, gold was discovered near Bermagui, just south of Mystery Bay. The Mines Department sent Lamont Young, one of its geologists, to report on the find. He travelled from Batemans Bay by rowing boat, a “green 8m vessel”, landed at Bermagui, and then left again, spotted by residents early in the morning as the boat moved slowly north. That afternoon a man riding along the coast found the boat on the rocks north of the goldfield, with no sign of the five men.

Police were puzzled. The boat had been steered through 70 metres of jagged rocks. There were four large holes in the hull but the planking had been stove out, not in. They found bait, a pocket knife, pipe and tobacco, food, a bag of potatoes, a bag of clothing, bedding, a sheath knife, an axe and shovel, three mother-of-pearl studs, a portion of a meal and three cigar butts. Large stones had been placed in the boat. None of the men were never heard of again despite searches, rewards, government inquiries and wide media coverage. That’s the mystery of Mystery Bay. The day I visit such sinister happenings seem impossible in the bright warm sun.

The geological story of the kink zone is a bit more difficult to research as google leads you to, amongst other things, sites dedicated to pansexual fetish lifestyles. The kinks I’m after are far more interesting and far older – like 500 million years old – cpressured into existence by the movement of tectonic plates. When I do find information it’s so technical that every third word eludes me. So understanding the mystery of the kink zone is a work in progress. 

What do I understand? That the rocks are sedimentary, which is obvious from the layering of patterns (maybe) and I’m told they’re chert, black mudstone and slate.  And that’s about where it ends for me. Once I encounter something like this – Differential shear stresses acting along or adjacent to a non-planar fault surface or shear zone may cause uneven acceleration during slip – my mind wants to doze off. Looking up each word and mastering its technicalities is life work I fear.

Then I stumble across an accessible definition: a kink is a tight curl, twist, or bend in a rock band. “Continued kink band growth can produce chevron folds.” That sentence is like meeting an old friend: I can recognise a chevron! Now all I need to do is to apply these definitions to the actual rock face – which means a return to Mystery Bay with J who has a better grip on such things than I do.

After this feeble excursion into geology I return to the more familiar aesthetics of the rock face, the rock pool, lichen and the leftovers from the tide.

 

It’s time to leave the kink zone and walk along to the sand and low rocks of the south end. As the sun warms me, I relax into another beautiful day, leaving the worries associated with ignorance behind me.

Eurobodalla beaches: One Tree Beach (the north end)

Tags

contrasts, nonsense, One Tree north, rockpools, rocks, shells

This morning I think I’m visiting a beach, but the sign tells me it’s a “facility”, the use of which may be hazardous. It’s likely to dish up rough surf, rips and currents, deep holes and gutters and submerged rocks. However, the tide is low, the ocean serene and I’m not planning to enter the water: I’m in more danger walking down the rotted wooden stairs to reach … the facility.

Enough quibbling over bureaucratic word choice! I survey the coastline from the lookout: south (where I beachwalked last) and north (where I’m beachwalking today). I take a brief memory detour via Menindee Lakes, transported back to weekend camping trips by pink and green hop plants very like the ones that grew in the landscape of my desert walks. Finally I access the beach and begin my gasping-with-delight tour of the southern end.

 The rocks here are knobbly, honeycombed, patterned in pink and blue, seamed with thick bands of gold, and host to rockpools. But my delight is equally the pastel sky and the rocky outcrops stretching darkly into the sea. This morning, mutterings of delight are accompanied by questions centring on the geological history of the rocks. The facility provides no answers.

In fact it generates more questions when I reach the other end of the beach and find smooth rocks lying like beached whales, spotted with dark grey patches and the tracery of barnacles and the lively black of tiny mussels. I climb the flanks somewhat gingerly and peer down into rounded crevices.

I’m tempted into a kind of mythic storymaking by geological ignorance: a return to the ancient response in the face of something mysterious. So …

Long long ago not far from the beginning of time, a primeval competition between two sculptors in rock to see who can create the best beach end. The competitors represent two aesthetics that match their appearance: one suave and debonair, smoothed to featurelessness, spare and minimal: the other gnarled and pitted by life, with mysterious dramatic episodes. They set to work, these two mythical beings, proto-Henry Moore and proto-Alberto Giacometti, beginning with the same landscape and invoking wind and water, and possibly tectonic plates, to help them shape it to their individual delight. They take a long time, eons in fact, and they haven’t finished yet. The Great Judge eyes off their handiwork so far, and with a fanfare of trumpets and a roar of sea horns announces his judgement: “They are … different.”

I decide I’m not much of a myth maker, so I venture into the field of allegory, at least I think that’s what it is. Maybe I can construct an allegory of the self: myself. Behold the rough hewn self: filled with secrets, inconsistencies, discontinuities; lunging from intention to intention. And yet in all this a richness of variety. Then there’s the smooth bland self, that offers always what’s expected, covered in barnacles and clams, non-intrinsic beauties, gifts from outside that are the personality. This self is still capable of the odd blush.

Eurobodalla beaches: One tree beach

Tags

memory, One Tree Beach, rockface, silhouettes, sunrise

This is a beach that spans multiple autobiographies, and ghosts scenes from my past that are etched in my usually noncapacious memory. Here first are the snapshots in words.

1

It’s late afternoon. I’m coordinating a writer’s workshop for students in the Eurobodalla. The guest writer and my co-coordinators are staying in the caravan park between the beach and the entrance of the Tuross River. We are sitting around, eating and talking about the day and how we might need to change tomorrow. I’ve resisted this workshop: every time I began thinking about organising it a steel shutter came down in my mind. I could see it, and hear its clang: I couldn’t fathom why there was such resistance. Shortly after this I decide to retire.

2

It’s midday after heavy rain. We’re walking along the sand stretching from the Blackie’s caravan park to the outlet of the river when we see a crowd gathered. Of course we head along to sticky beak and discover a huge machine beginning  to move the sand that has settled across the river mouth, raising the level of the lake and warming it to a smelly, and as far as fish are concerned death-dealing, 23°. Dolphins trapped inside are languishing. There’s quite a gathering from both sides, people we’ve known forever have walked across from the Tuross side, and old acquaintances gather on the Potato Point side. We chat, as the machine sets about its work. The people from the north are watching particularly carefully, because they need to cross back or face a very long walk home. But everyone paying close attention because we’re all there to see the dramatic moment of breach.

3

It’s the middle of a grey splattery-rainy day. This is the end of a morning of flood tourism. The other two members of the tour group are no longer interested and we’ve left them behind to walk home. We’ve already watched the river whirl over the bridge near J’s place and race under the bridge across the highway north of Bodalla. It’s been raining heavily for days and the Tuross is churning furiously as it empties floodwaters into the ocean. My Queensland son and I stand on the edge, watching the swirling fury, the waves coming back on themselves as river meets surf.

4

It’s a placid sunny day with a stiffish breeze as the eye of memory looks across the river opening to the lake and spots a sailing boat, a clumsy looking object, with a tarpaulin sail. It’s tacking and twisting, he manoeuvring, she sitting and looking apprehensive. J’s been a boatman since he was 7, I haven’t mastered nautical nonchalance, even if the lake is neither deep nor wide. But we’re skittering along and the speed becomes exhilarating,

5

Another day, mid afternoon. A group gathers, clustering in changing patterns. If you watch closely you’ll see that there’s an odd hybrid of familiarity and hesitation as people talk and move on. There’s a hint of the hippy in long hair and long skirts, and a sombreness that’s rare on a beach. Slowly you figure out that they’ve gathered to farewell someone. The groups fall silent and remain near a rocky outcrop while the family gathers out of sight and swirls the ashes of our friend into the water.

Places have their own histories, but they also acquire the history of people who visit. These are my ghosts, my remnants, my shadows, traces of my past. These are the shards of memory I take to One Tree Beach at daybreak.

As you might expect, if you visit this blog often, I spend an inordinate amount of time doting on rockface. This morning is no exception, although the stranded tree and the possibilities of silhouette also draw me, as does the encroaching golden light.

Once I’ve had my fill of the shady end, I head off into the morning light towards the mouth of the river, and sit on a log watching a woman far more daring than I clamber along the headland which will give her a view uninvaded by caravan parks.

Then I do my own tamer version of scramble and cross the piles of driftwood to explore a rocky outcrop.

The patterning of rock here is astonishingly diverse so I employ a modification of “every 20 steps a photograph” called “every step a photograph.”  I can’t even limit myself to one every step. Fortunately the outcrop is not very large.

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I stand in front of the lifebuoy (ring buoy, lifering, lifesaver, life donut, life preserver, lifebelt, kisby ring, perry buoy) and take in the view: out over a benign-looking sea to a low bank of cloud, and south towards the Potato Point headland.

As I walk back along the beach I feel a presence behind me, keeping pace. I’m briefly fanciful and imagine it’s ghosts from the past, but in fact it’s my inordinately long shadow.

One Tree Beach is at the mouth of the Tuross River in the township of Tuross Heads, north of Potato Point. Take the turnoff from the highway south of Moruya, and turn left when you reach a T intersection. The road takes you along the waterfront until you reach a car park marked by a single small pine: someone killed the grand pine and this one replaced it. There is a picnic area and a lookout and ramp access to the beach.

Eurobodalla beaches: Dalmeny

Tags

Aboriginal connection, Dalmeny, history, rocks, whales

There are people about today: playing in teams with some kind of throwing thing on the beach; splashing in the water where Mummaga Lake enters the sea with a rush; fishing placidly from the rocks; clambering around with bucket and spade; picnicking on the grass; watching an infant take her first steps; and staggering around watching every footfall amongst the pools and slashes of rock poking out of the sand, camera at the ready. 

This beach is just in front of a caravan park, still occupied by school holiday makers. It’s the peak of low tide, so the rocky platform is exposed and the sand firm. This is my third unfamiliar beach in a week, and they couldn’t be more different. What is the essence of this one? Shingle consisting of bigger shells than I saw at Plantation Beach, or McKenzies. Rocks piled up into a rounded turret or weathered to the shape of Opera House sails. Seams of white quartzlike rock wandering their way through the surface and crevices of their host. Narrow vertical ridges. Gleaming mustard-yellow slabs with smooth hollows.  Rockpools, and rock-dimples filled with shells.

That’s my narrow world, at noon on a particular day. But there are other worlds here too.

Geology has been busy for eons, shaping the shoreline and its beauties, making it unique. Weathering and the repetitious action of the sea are co-creators of all the shapes and patterns that have given pleasure to the tiny dot in the universe that is me.

Yuin Elder, YIrrimah evokes the Aboiginal world: “We’ve got totems here. Our sisters swim through the rocks. The whales, the seabirds, eels, crabs, they’re our family.” An information board lists Aboriginal names: maara maara, waagal, junga, yannga, bimbulla, wondarma, mingo. (What whitefellas call sea mullet, blackfish, octopus, lobster, Sydney cockles, appleberry, grass tree.)

Migrating Humpback whales come in close to shore on their long journey north to breed in the tropics in winter and then back to the Antarctic summer feeding grounds. If you’re lucky you can see them spouting and breaching, sometimes mother and baby playing together.

William Mort brought the whitefella world of sheep and dairy cows here in the 1880s. He settled land behind the beach and along Mummaga Lake, now State Forest and the suburb of Dalmeny, named by him after his Eton schoolfriend who became Lord Dalmeny, an obscure British Prime Minister.

Intrepid camping holiday-makers began coming in the 1920s, although by then Narooma just down the coast was a holiday destination with some pretty classy guest houses. This influx continues: a number of people I meet holiday here for years before they make it their retirement home, and the population swells dramatically over summer.

And then there are the current holiday makers, grabbing the last of the warmth, and me on my mission to visit every beach in the shire.

Dalmeny is the next beach down from Potato Point: to access it take the Tourist Drive turnoff from the Princes Highway about 8 kilometres south of Bodalla, until you reach the caravan park. There’s some confusion about the name. My coastal bible, Beaches of Batemans Bay and the Eurobodalla Coast by Peter and Manuela Henry, calls the northern part Brou Beach with Dalmeny in brackets: and the southern part (where I photographed for this post) Josh’s Beach. Names in this coastal strip seem to be mutable.

Eurobodalla beaches: Plantation Point

Tags

Plantation Beach, rocks

For the first time since I came home, I need my spotted gum walking stick as I feel my way down the narrow track to this beach of boulders. It’s like no other beach I’ve seen on my coastline: the rocks are large and chunky, with only occasional patches of sand, shingle, and shell debris. Some are rounded-rectangular, some smooth and eliptoid, some pitted and honeycombed, some patterned with apricot shapes or whitish splotches. Many carry an embedded line that wanders over gaps. Sometimes oyster shells cling to their undersurface, or a dead crab lies orange and exposed. It’s low tide and I clamber cautiously out onto the flatter slabs closer to the sea, where green weed grows luxuriantly and a living crab scuttles for cover.

I return to the track, uneasy through grass. It’s steeper than I remember and paved with elegant interwoven droppings of Norfolk pines. As I walk back towards the car, I realise I’ve edged my way north and staggered up a different track. I walk into a plantation of grand pines, not exactly natives, but providing pleasant deep shade and wonderful bark. My son tells me such trees were used as navigation markers for ships at sea.

Eurobodalla beaches: McKenzie Beach

Tags

McKenzie Beach, rockface patterns

Warning: If you don’t share my passion for patterns on rock faces, you might like to give this post a miss. I’m probably guilty of the imitative fallacy in attempting to create in my reader sighs of ecstasy to mirror my experience.

I’m back on the job with a series which has been languishing since December 2015. McKenzie is my 26th Eurobodalla beach: I’ve now visited about a third of the beaches my shire has to offer.  The last time I visited McKenzie was probably 30 years ago, on December 25th, the inaugural “Just a vegemite sandwich for Christmas lunch, as long as there’s a surf” celebration.

This morning the sun is bright and the sky blue, with just a few clouds and initially a slight crispness to the air. It’s a small beach and exactly as I remember it, enclosed in a hug between two headlands. One end is sunny, the other in the shade. I opt for the shady end first, mainly because the other end is overlooked by a couple of houses. I crunch through deep shell grit, popping the occasional seaweed bubble. You could easily forget that the coast road swoops past just behind the sand as you become mesmerised by the patterns on the rocks. I find myself muttering ecstatically every time I turned my eyes in a different direction – not only rocks but rockpools, the blue sea, the green weed, and that Australian autumn air on my skin. I’m wary near the cliffs: the tumble of rocks is a warning.

The south end of the beach isn’t as dramatic in its patternings, maybe because sun bleaches colour, maybe because my appetite for visual wonders is sated. As I walk across the sand, I see remnants – the inside and the broken shell of a sea urchin; the curling track of a shell-creature; and an operculum, once doorway to the home of another shell-creature. By the time I leave the beach to buy a stove, pick up twin portraits from the framer, price carpet to protect against dog-grime, and acquire touch-up paint for the mini-scratches on the car’s paintwork, the sea and the beach are both occupied by pleasure seekers. Lads lie on their boards, waiting for a wave and children sit at the waterline collecting shells. I’m leaving the beach in good hands.

Reclaiming the beach

Tags

fungi, home roads, Potato Point beach, seaweed

I’ve been home from a year in Warsaw for a week and all I’ve done is sleep peculiar hours and feel displaced. It has taken me all that time to drive my unwilling feet down to the beach, despite all the envy I expressed of other people’s beaches. Why? I want stimulation and I tell myself, as I have many times before, that I’ve seen all there is to see. I finally drag myself out early on a drizzly day, sky vanished in grey sea mist. I ramble around the village, walking up my street, stopping at the viewing seat above Jemison’s Beach and passing judgement on the wooden stairs completed while I was away; walking up the hill to the trig past grazing wallabies and a raindrop-speckled yucca; and then down to the seaweed strewn sand of Potato Point beach. 

The tide is low and the colour leached. I see the world through rain-specked glasses, and feel the beach working a bit of preliminary magic. The light is perfect for photography, and clumps of seaweed lie on the sand arranged like artworks on a gallery wall, not so many that it’s overwhelming.

I leave the beach to walk back along the puddly road and encounter the precursors to a festival of fungi.

I  amble across Troll Bridge and the grassy kangaroo-lolling patch. One old fellow missing an ear looks up at me from the swamp. I’ve begun to reclaim my southern hemisphere home.

Eurobodalla beaches: Myrtle Beach, Dark Beach and Emily Miller headland

Tags

Dark Beach, Emily Miller headland, Myrtle Beach

Please join me as I visit three contiguous and very different beaches on the same hot day.

 

Myrtle Beach

The walk in to Myrtle Beach is through twisty spotted gum bushland dense with burrawangs, including an ancient one with a tall, thick trunk. The drop to the beach is surprisingly steep, down wooden stairs.

 

 

What we are seeking here is unconformity, the place of rendezvous for the tilted / folded Wagonga Beds and the horizontal sedimentation of Sydney sandstone, where angles meet straight lines. We find it easily – even I can see the junction, although the camera has a bit of trouble. Things are complicated by chunky rubble in the rugged cliffs at the north end of the beach. Photography is difficult because the sun seems to be wherever I point the camera. But there are great fallen slabs, and slabbed is the best description of the sheer cliffs.

 

Can you see the unconformity?

 

 

 

 

Forget geology and admire beauty!

 

As we return up the staircase, I see “NUD …” scratched into the timber balustrade, and realise why the man who came down to the beach is fussing around settling his paraphernalia. He wants us gone, taking our unknown sensibilities with us. I'd forgotten this is a nudist beach.

On the way back to the car we follow side tracks looking for a way down to the next beach. The drop is always impossibly dauntingly steep.

 

 

 

 

Dark Beach

However, from the carpark there is a track we didn't notice when we arrived so we follow its gentle slope. Dark Beach is a surprise, unlike any other south coast beach I've encountered: fine dark gravel, ankle deep under our weight and puddling in the bottom of our footprints. The biggest surprise is the yellow sand of the next beach, just across a black Narooma chert barrier: how have the beaches remained so separate and distinctive?

Here again we find an unconformity, that magic junction between two totally different rock histories; breccia, a mash-up of angled rocks (or is it conglomerate since most of the jumble of rocks are rounded?); and one of our early geological acquaintances, hard black Narooma chert.

When we're ready to leave we have no problem finding the entrance to the track: a sinister dark glove rising out of the dark sand marks the way.

 

 

 

 

Conglomerate (rounded stones) or breccia ((angular edged stones)?

 

 

A comparison of two beaches

 

 

 

Emily Miller Headland

 

To get to the Emily Miller headland we walk along a fenceline protecting us from unstable cliffs and down a track that uses the sandstone as stairs at the bottom. The rock platform is cut by a trench which seems to be an old dike worn away. I was too timid to jump the abyss although it was an easy step across: next time when it's cooler and I haven't just had a lunch beer I'll be much more daring. While J explores the rock platform, I sit in the sun near a perfect curve containing a layer of gravel, basking in the beauty of pure sandstone country.

 

 

 

 

By lunchtime we are losing geological focus and drenched with sweat so we return home for a long afternoon doze and then a river-loll and wine by the rapids.

 

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