Reclaiming the headland

Tags

casuarina, fungi, ocean, spotted gum, tracks

Gradually I’m re-establishing myself at the Point. My second walk is out onto the headland, on a misty morning when Mother Gulaga is completely buried under cloud. I need to watch my footing: Warsaw cobblestones are replaced by banksia roots; dog shit by kangaroo poo; ice and snow by squelchy mud.  

Beautifully constructed ant-nests, like the work of a master potter, emerge from the sandy track. I am startled when I reach the beach: the creek has retreated from the sea, cut off by a high sandbar, and I can cross the sand directly without having to angle my way along a crumbly sand-cliff edge. When I left a year ago this was not so: the creek intermittently emptied straight into the ocean. I miss the actual presence of kangaroos: I don’t see one where in the past this early in the morning I might see up to 40. My son reckons they’re all grazing on lawns in the village.

I walk up the wooden stairs and along the track heading south. I stand on the headland and watch the sea rolling in, sending up eruptions of splash and waterfalling back down over the rocks. Here at the place where I lay watching eagles swirl just overhead with my niece; contemplated life on the first day of retirement; sat reading and whalewatching in beautiful solitude; photographed friends in a studio without equal; and fended off the man in brown shoes.

I’m glad to renew my acquaintance with old familiars, casuarinas with their lichen trunks and spotted gums with their hallmark splotches.

There’s a fanfare of fungus: everywhere the white tops and frilliness of mushrooms, some as big as a good-sized saucer with a stippled cap;  some delicate, not much more than skeletal; some standing proudly on a tall stem; some brown and white; some russet as they emerge from casuarina needles; and one a rich crimson with a minute pool in its cap.

Soon I’ll be a re-natived Potato Pointian!

Family gathering

Tags

beach, bush, Christmas holidays, daughter-in-law from heaven

My house is no longer the staid domicile of a working son, a woman in her seventies and a white dog with black eyepatches. It's the roiling base for the Mt Tamborine mob: my son and daughter-in-law, two grandkids and a calm black dog. The garage is full of camping gear; kayaks and surf boards lie under rainforest trees; wetsuits and wet underpants dangle from branches; a TV migrates upstairs surrounded by a scatter of Nintendo handsets. The frig is packed with ham, leftovers, chicken thawing, lettuce and herbs from J's garden dome – but not with whatever it is A's looking for when he opens it hopefully. There is perpetual coming and going: K's sisters are staying north at Tuross; S's mates south near Tilba.

The beach calls: T and A are old enough to surf alone or bike around the village, and even I ramble down late one afternoon to watch them ride waves and my granddog dig a colony of holes. On Christmas Day, J and I stand on the headland and watch our youngest in the empty sea waiting and waiting for a wave. Another day, his brother documents him in the thick of more action. Uncle H hops his 6' onto a motorbike too small for his nephew and hoons up the street, knees up to chin. The Christmas lunch entertainment is provided by the coupling of a murky brown no-egg vegan pumpkin pie (mine for J) and a luscious white pavlova, six inches of eggs, sugar and cream (T's for the rest of us) which tempted me into two evil slices.

One of the holiday rituals for S is a motorbike adventure with his mates out into the rugged wilderness behind Cobargo, this time negotiating the notorious razorback ridge where there's a sheer drop into two valleys. I go out with him, about an hour from home, to hide extra fuel, through Nerrigundah and out to Belowra and Belimbla. Although I haven't been out there for many years, it feels beautifully familiar: the view out over the ranges of the great divide, and then the opening out into the Belowra Valley. We stop on the edge of the dirt road where there is a brief moment of mobile reception and I eavesdrop as S talks to someone who knows the area, scrutinises the map, is tortured by locked gates, and then discusses his findings with a mate. I sit idly and suddenly see something tiny and white moving quickly on the rocky road edge – an ant with some kind of food – or is it an egg? I'm astonished that I can see something minute so clearly and I track its movements for five minutes and about three meters before I lose sight. Phone calls over, we go back the way we've come for a rethink and then follow tracks down to the clear waters of the Tuross looking for a ford.

While we're away a miracle has happened. I left a vast pile of mulch on the grass outside my fence. It is no longer there – it has been spread all over my front yard, K's handiwork with a bit of help from my son and grandkids. Once she starts there is no stopping her: she prunes and clears and leaf-blows and terminates vines until my front yard actually looks weed-free and tidy. My feeble plan for the mulch was two wheelbarrows a day: she does it by the car-trailer.

This isn't the end of her home maintenance. Discovering my gutters need clearing she finds a ladder and climbs up onto the roof to remove the litter of a shameful number of years, including the shed skin of my resident python. In all of which she assures me she takes great pleasure, not enjoying idleness.

There is a lot of calm time between frenetic activity: teasing the dog by pretending to eat his hambone or reading. My resident son produces books from his downstairs hoard for his nephew. Grandfather and 12-year-old grandson compete for the same book: So you've been publicly shamed by Jon Ronson. A. goes off to ride his bike and tucks the book out of sight. This is a time-honoured family tradition: you hide what you're reading so no one can nick it.

When they go out for the day, the house reverts to silence, and feels quite empty.

 

Kids!

Waiting for a wave ...

... and catching one

Brown's cows and Christmas lunch

Preparing for an epic motorbike ride

The daughter-in-law from heaven

 

 

Acknowledgement: The title of this post was appropriated from one of Paula's challenges. I thank her! This post wasn't appropriate for a one-photo challenge, nor had the events in it happened then.

 

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My Stanthorpe daughter

My Stanthorpe daughter is a whole library of posts. How to reduce her to one? And dare I impose my memories of her on the richness of her life?

I know she’s my daughter, because I saw the small birthmark on her right eyebrow while she was still umbilically attached, and because everyone who meets me up here says “My god. You two look so alike!” However on all other evidence I’d wonder.

She spent her childhood largely with my mother while I was at work, and they had a bond I would love to have with my grandchildren. They read many stories together and shared the invention of a little pink pig who lived under the lemon tree in my mother’s back yard. They had picnics and visited apple country at Bilpin, where as a three year oldshe was fascinated by the apple-sorting machine and gave me a detailed account of its working.

I suspect she was born precocious. She was reading early and at four loved Laura Ingall Wilder’s Little House books, identifying deeply with Laura. When we went for kindergarten orientation the teacher begged us to stop her learning to read any more. Her first day at school she insisted on going into the yard by herself and instructing older kids in the finer points of ball-bouncing. She wasn’t used to kids: she only knew adoring adults. School wasn’t altogether a pleasure for her – but neither was home-schooling, when I unleashed my frustrated pedagogue on her: Latin and the history of Babylon for a nine year old? What was I thinking?

In high school she discovered community radio and independence. She found herself a substitute family in town and we rarely saw her. She often worked the graveyard shift; other nights she and a friend took a lemon meringue pie to the rocks along the river and picnicked. She rode the wild brumbies in the swamp by the Deua River; she added detergent to the town fountain; she wagged school; she made trips to Sydney on her own, prowling where I’d definitely fear to tread; she answered an HSC question on a book her class hadn’t even studied; and wrote an essay her teacher was still using as model for his students when I met him in my consultancy role fifteen years later.

Then she finished school. University or the wide wide world? She embarked on the picking life – grapes in Mildura, apples in Batlow – and began to travel as soon as she had the cash. England first, where she landed a job as nanny to a couple of posh kids whose parents had photos on the wall of themselves with members of the royal family. She made them costumes for the Christmas play and did all she could to subvert their class. There was trouble from the other parents when she went barefoot when it was her turn in the car pool. She hitched and made friends and found work and travelled more. She met her sister (then 15) in Bangkok and rode elephants and cleaned her teeth with depilatory. This became the pattern: work, and then travel. Lost, she camped in the mist near the Nepal border at election time, still so innocent that she thought the figures moving towards her were coming to show her the way. In fact they interrogated her for hours, suspecting that she was a Russian spy.

Back in Australia she began working and in North Queensland. The piglet she was raising disappeared near a crocodile’s mud-slide. When a relationship turned sour, she raced off through floodwaters in a car less reliable than the man, and ended up meeting Andrew, her best friend for many years, until he died unnecessarily and far too young and left her totally bereft.

She also met a Canadian, with whom she push-biked from Adelaide to Darwin, Macedonia to Poland, and in Zimbabwe. They were married in Canada, her dressed in black and high heels, with one of his mates as her “bridesmaid”, and a minister called Cecil B. Trotman officiating. After the wedding, husband and “bridesmaid” went off to watch an ice hockey match.

The marriage disintegrated, and she finally settled in a small village near Stanthorpe, and enrolled at University: the university she had early entry to in her last year at school. She chose the University of New England because she remembered deer in its parklands from a visit when she was 3 and J was studying there. Last year she finished her bachelors degree with an honours dissertation on the marginalization of seasonal workers in rural communities.

By the time she’d finished the degree, she was no longer a seasonal worker: she now uses her considerable knowledge of Stanthorpe as an employee at the tourist information centre, and front of house at one of the caravan parks. She’s an active campaigner for the Greens, and still holds it against us that we voted Labour in 2007. She shops at Vinnie’s and castigated me roundly once for spending 70c on a lemon squeezer there: when she wants something she lets it be known and gets a phone call from the volunteers when something likely comes in.

At last she has time (a little bit – her two part-time jobs somehow have her regularly working 14 days straight) for a social life and has earnt many times over the six weeks in Europe she is now enjoying.

 

This is a very partial biography, in both senses of the word. I obviously deeply admire my daughter, and this attempt at her life is limited by my selectivity: undoubtedly, she would frame her own life differently. It gave me great pleasure to write about her in the idiosyncratic home she has made for herself on the border between two states. I hope she feels I have done small justice to a remarkable woman.

 

 

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My Tamborine family

Tags

Mt Tamborine

No photos, but I need to pay tribute to my son's mob – my granddaughter, my grandson, their mother, and my son. They are all wonderfully knowledgeable, smart and curious and expand my world with their company.

My granddaughter is 15. She has an agility and wisdom I haven't managed in seventy years. When we have lunch together, we talk about books and movies, and being a teenager. She tolerates my techno out-of-touchness, albeit with some amusement. She goes off to spend a few days at the coast with a friend's grandparents, and comes back with a triumphant op shop haul. She models it with elan and twirl, and turns my second-rate videos into a neat iMovie. She complains because she likes to pre-plan a shoot and go for special effects: my gumby shooting doesn't allow this. I've watched a few of her movies, and they have flair: one for a Japanese project at school was quite surreal. Late afternoon, she dresses in black and goes off to her job waitressing at an Indian restaurant. When she was two, she crowded round the hoofs of a horse her mother was medicating showing absolutely no fear, and one day disappeared on the acreage they were living on: she just followed the dogs on an adventure along the creek and eventually turned up at the stables. She rides, plays guitar, sings very sweetly and mourns being a good girl.

My grandson (11) is all bone and muscle. He wins ribbons for swimming and a medal for academic achievement. He shoots a basketball with accuracy, handles a soccer ball with skill, and twiddles and fiddles with everything within reach, inventing games. My own bones ache as I watch him perching in air supported only by his elbows, and trampolining expertly, somersaulting and corkscrewing until I'm dizzy. When I take him to the hairdressers, he navigates me to a salon amongst the trees, and then navigates the hairdresser to a style that satisfies him. I try to shout him lunch, but he insists on paying his way. He is mightily offended when he cops a bird dropping on his new cap while we eat chips on the grass under power lines.

I admire my son's partner immensely for so many things I lack. She is very skilful with animals and knows a lot about all sorts of creatures, not only horses and dogs. She has an expansive collection of animal skulls, which she displays lovingly: a kookaburra with the beak sheath intact; a wombat from the Eurobodalla bush; a koala skull, and koala claws which are drying out on the mosquito coil holder on the deck; an albatross head found on Potato Point beach last Christmas and still being defleshed; and deer antlers and skull, picked up recently at a Tamborine op shop. She can roof and make wooden furniture. Se is interested in all sorts of things. We spent a long time discussing the rights and wrongs of toilet paper orientation and the amazing tattoo-like patterns lightning uses to mark its victims.

My son is a scientist with Queensland Water. His job is to monitor the health of waterways, which up till now has involved extensive field work in the local rivers and streams. He also has a management role, and I particularly enjoy talking to him about this, since it's cognate with my pre-retirement work. He is a passionate surfer and talks about surfing with a kind of reverence, regretting that his own children don't seem to have such a consuming passion. As a child he played violin, and later guitar, writing his own music. He regrets the passing of this creativity as it droozles away in the marshlands of work and family. We talk at length one evening over beer and prawns while the rest of the family is busy elsewhere. The frightening dare-devilry of his youth has diminished but he still likes adventure and relishes time spent in the bush or in the outback.

 

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At my daughter’s house

Tags

pink pig, rescue hens, sheds

My daughter lives in a small village on the Queensland-NSW border near Stanthorpe, in a green house with a multitude of sheds and animals, and a water tank high on the shed roof. We sleep in the corner bedroom, surrounded by a Dawson River weeper. At the end of the day, we all sit outside, playing musical chairs in what is usually the Dog Lounge. We watch for the storm that is becoming a daily occurrence, and soon a curtain of water pours from the gutters, and conversation is drowned out. The dahlia tree has become a solstice tree with purple baubles and a string of white lights. Stained glass containers glow with candlelight and the humans become more and more raucous as night falls. I relish the presence of four members of my gene pool and their precious partners.

I look forward to a photo-shoot in the yard, but leave my run a bit late and have to dash out in rain lulls. The pink pig, a repurposed gas cylinder, has settled in under the lemon tree, a reminder of the imaginary pink pig my mother invented and located under the lemon tree in her yard when my daughter was tiny. The sheds provide a rich collection of dilapidated, and shelter for chooks and alpacas.

My daughter was recently in a state of conflict as she watched a hawk kill one of her chickens: torn between the desire to protect the chicken and a sense of privilege at watching the hawk hunt so skilfully. The chicken didn't survive, but the household is now on hawk alert: any disturbance among the chooks is instantly investigated. She has a flock of rescue hens: debeaked layers who were headed for death before she took them on. They are looking very healthy now, free-ranging and living on vegetable scraps, recovering from the brief and brutal life of a battery hen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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