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: 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.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Eurobodalla beaches: Wasp Head

Tags

dropstone, fossils, sandstone, Wasp Head

Happy Christmas Day to you all – and no, I'm not blogging on Christmas Day. This is a scheduled post, my gift to you from a very special place.

 

Wasp Head is a beach unlike any other I've ever seen. At 280 million years old, it has all the apricot blush, lure and comeliness of geological youth. The landscape here is the result of sedimentation and the movement of glaciers and there isn't only spectacular sandstone but shell fossils, ironstone box work, dropstones, and even, somewhere, fossil logs.

We begin our exploration of Wasp Head admiring the colours and shapes of a sandstone cliff-face. Then we amble around honeycombed rocks until our way is stopped by the sea. At this point we do our usual find-a-path: a scramble up a slope slippery with casuarina needles and dry leaves, a stroll through a casuarina forest and a descent down a grassy hill to an expansive rock platform.

 

 

 

The rock platform is honeycombed, flat with the occasional standing rock. On one of these J spots a shell fossil, and the search is on. It wasn't the only one.

 

 

 

 

There are also dropstones carried along and then discarded by glaciers, gravel flows embedded in rock, and strange holes for which I have no explanation.

 

As we move around the levels of the rock platform we look across to the island over a group of surfers, busy catching waves and breaking boards.

 

 

After a late picnic breakfast – potatoes, bread, hummus and leaf litter picked in a hurry from J's garden (“We'll just brush the dirt off!”), we head down the path to another platform, this time sloping in sandstone curves to the vivid sea. Here are patterns and curlicues; intricate ironstone boxes; and maybe even a leaf fossil.

 

 

 

 

The tide covers the beach below cutting us off from further adventures, so we head home, already planning to return to this astonishing landscape.

 

 

 

 

Maybe Jo's Monday walkers would enjoy this taste of the NSW south coast.

 

 

Posted with Blogsy

Discovery of the week: Fossilised ripples

Tags

Cadgee, fossilised ripples

This won't become a weekly series, because there's no guarantee that each week will proffer a startling discovery. But last week did.

On Saturday afternoon we drove along the river road towards Nerrigundah, the road that I walked in twelve instalments last year with such pleasure. We wanted to examine the rock in the cuttings with new geological eyes, and see if it matched any rockage we'd seen on the ridge in the morning.

We scrutinised the rock face in a way that never occurred to me twelve months ago, noting the easy way pieces peeled or broke off and fell to the road.

Then, high up, a riveting sight. Our first local fossil. Not a shell or a leaf – these rocks are too old for that. What we were looking at was ripples, that most evanescent of motion, captured in stone.

 

Can you spot them?

 

How about now?

 

Posted with Blogsy

Following the Kanawinka Geotrail: 2

Tags

Budj Bim, Byaduk Caves, h, lava tubes, the "petrified forest", tumuli

After the watery interlude at Nelson, we continue our volcano safari east. I am eager to see the “petrified forest”, billed in the Kanawinka leaflet as a Moonah forest drowned by dunes that then hardened. So we head out towards the coast, passing an intriguing string of caves fenced off, a track leading up, but no signs to explain them. Later research told me they were the Tarragal Caves, undercuts in ancient dune limestone and important Aboriginal camping places: excavations in the 1970s revealed shell midden deposits and earth ovens over 11,000 years old.

 

 

Cape Bridgewater and the “petrified forest”

We arrive at the wild southern ocean to find a parade of wind turbines there before us, drowning the sound of the sea and intruding on the visual strangeness of the barren landscape: rock and saltbush and then the sea. We walk past what we interpret as hollows left by the dissolution of trees: circles on the ground and tubular shapes in the cliffs. Then we found an information panel that explains that the “forest” is not after all petrified trees, but a collection of hollow limestone tubes, eroded by millions of years of rainfall. This process begins when mineral-saturated water gathers in a shallow pan of sand and seeps downwards, dissolving the limestone and cementing the sand. However it was formed, it is an eerie desolate landscape. A flow of black basalt tumbles down to the sea, beginning grey like a wrinkled elephant hide before it turns typical basalt black.

 

 

Budj Bim

The approach to Budj Bim (Mt Eccles) is through flattish country towards an undistinguished horizon. The first time I drove out there years ago, drawn by a brown national parks sign, I didn't expect much. A mistake. Apart from koalas, it offers a crater lake, lava tubes and a lava cave.

Our first sight of Budj Bim itself is in cross-section. The whole side of the mountain has been sliced away by a extractinf scoria (igneous rock with bubble-like cavities) for road building.

 

 

 

After we pitch camp we head off to walk around the rim of the crater. Imagine yourself back in the time, 33000 years ago, when Budj Bim was formed. There is boiling lake and frothy lava jets up in a fountain. It cools rapidly to form scoria. There's a wind from the west and it blows the scoria from the crater to build the cone. Then liquid lava splashes onto the sides of the mountain. Some of it sticks and solidifies into basalt: some falls away before it turns solid and leaves gaping holes.

The lake is called Lake Surprise, named by a school child in the 1920s and is contained by three craters.

 

 

The next morning we begin the day with a stroll along the remains of a lava tube, the walls towering above us. Overflow from lava or splatter from a turbulent lava flow built up in thin layers to form levee banks. The banks grew inwards to overarch the flow, eventually joining to make a roof. There are signs of a collapsed roof along the lava canal. The deep cave, the natural arch, is one place where the roof hasn't collapsed.

 

 

Tumuli

The landscape not far from Budj Bim is scattered with roughly circular mounds of rock: tumuli or lava blisters, created by the buckling of brittle crust by the upward flow of underlying lava.

Beneath lowering clouds, we slither under an electric fence (there were no KEEP OUT signs) and dodging cow pats prowl around an area scattered with tumuli which are “rarely found in the volcanics of the world”: the only other sites are in Africa and Iceland. Sometimes drystone walls connect with the tumuli, a more orderly tumble of rocks.

 

 

Byaduk Caves

These caves are the result of action at Mt Napier (see below). The largest tunnels are up to 18 metres wide, 10 metres high, and extend to depths of 20 metres below the surface. The main features of Cave 1 are the ferns and mosses at the entrance and the large circular chamber at the far end with a complete domed lava floor. The western sinkhole is roughly elliptical, and at the western end this leads by various entrances to low-level passages. The western sinkhole is connected to the eastern one by a short tunnel.

The Caves support a sizeable Bent-winged Bat population and offer twenty species of ferns. Mammal bones including those of the Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger) have been found in the caves.

And no. We entered none of them: the clambering looked too daunting.

 

 

Mt Napier and Harman Valley

 

Looking beyond the Harman Valley, in the distance, is the distinctive shape of Mt Napier. 8 000 years ago a spectacular lava fountain several hundred metres high roared up from a lava lake in Mt Napier's crater from a depth of thirty kilometres. Lava flows surged down several valleys including the Harman Valley, through lava tubes hidden under a solidified crust. Inside the tubes the rock stayed molten and travelled 27 kilometres.

Our last volcanic act in this ten-day volcano crawl is the ascent of Mt Napier, and a fitting end it is. The crater is a dry one and the rim gives a panoramic view out over country we'd been traversing, as far as the Grampians and the wind farms on the coast.

 

 

Posted with Blogsy

Following the Kanawinka Geotrail: 1

Tags

Grampians, Mt Gambier, Mt Schank, Nigretta Falls, Silverband Falls

Thanks to Suzanne, whose photos of western Victoria have intrigued me for a long time. When I showed interest in volcanos, she introduced me to the Kanawinka website, and thus this jaunt was born.

 

Where do I begin recounting our geological adventure? Ten days away were filled with so many half-grasped discoveries that my ignorance began to weigh heavily on me. My son cold-comforted me by saying “You should come back with more understanding than you left with.” That would not be hard, but neither is it enough. I'm reminded yet again that knowledge is the reward for hard work.

The Kanawinka Geotrail tracks volcanic activity from Portland in Victoria to Narracoorte in South Australia, an area internationally recognised as the Kanawinka Global Geopark. It includes more than sixty sites: craters, caves, plateaus, waterfalls, cones, lava flows, lakes, tumuli, mountains. “Kanawinka” is an Aboriginal word meaning the land of tomorrow: it encapsulates for me the nature of geology – geological activity in the distant past is in fact creating the land of tomorrow, and continues to do so.

 

The flat plains of western NSW

 

 

First thought is that the horizon-to-horizon flatness of western NSW offers nothing of geological interest. And then you discover that the vast flat plains were formed as equally vast mountains disintegrated. No landscape lacks a geological pedigree.

 

Gariwerd (The Grampians)

The Grampians aren't part of the volcano story, but of course they are part of the geological story, and their geology has created spectacular landscapes. From Hall's Gap to Dunkeld is about 60 kilometres and all the way you are driving beside or towards dramatic bluffs and cliffs. This is Carboniferous sandstone country: the sandy sediments formed 350 million when this was the eastern shoreline of Australia. An ancient beach became high mountain as the sediments were tilted and uplifted in the Middle Devonian Period to form a cuesta escarpment, long and gentle heavily wooded slopes to the west and precipitous cliffs and steep slopes facing east.

 

 

A gentle stroll from a car park took us to Silverband Falls, a narrow stripe of water falling vertically over horizontal rock banding: a recognisable sedimentary pattern, or am I being too simple-minded?

 

 

Nigretta Falls, well outside the Grampians, are a very different kettle of fish. They are formed of 410-million-year-old volcanic rock: complex crack patterns in the hard rock shape the form of the falls, producing a series of cascades which finally fall into a pool and then gurgle off in a chatty river.

 

 

Finally we get around to the real business of a volcanic area – rims and craters. We circumambulate four rims (the Blue Lake at Mt Gambier, Mt Schank, Mt Napier and Budj Bim previously known as Mt Eccles) and encounter three crater lakes, and two dry craters.

 

Mt Gambier

Mt Gambier is famous for its blue lake. We saw it first, an eye-searing blue in the late afternoon, but when we walked around it the next morning it was a subdued greyish blue. A couple of local women apologised because we weren't seeing their lake at its best. I have a very strong memory of walking around that lake 50-odd years ago, but it soon became obvious that this was impossible. My memory has been defective for a lot longer than I thought!

Mt Gambier is one of the youngest volcanos in Australia. Once upon a time, fifteen to forty million years ago, the area was covered in a shallow sea rich in animal life, the remains of which gradually formed limestone. That's the white layer just above the surface of the lake, extending deep down. Long ago, my father-in-law built a house on his opal mine claim out of just such limestone, complete with fossils, backloaded from South Australia by his truckie son.

Four to five thousand years ago, lava flowed over the countryside through fractures in the limestone. The lava cooled and solidified to form a layer of basalt up to 20 metres thick.

 

The real drama seems to have occurred when groundwater percolated down and became superheated steam when it encountered the hot lava. Pressure built up and large volumes of molten rock blasted through the basalt layer. Bombs of basalt and limestone, weighing up to twenty tonnes were hurled out. Explosive eruptions deposited layers of ash and rocks to form the present crater. The rim walk gave us remarkable cut-away views of the layers of volcanic ash.

The story of the volcano is portrayed by local school-children on panels around the lake.

 

 

The Buandig people from near Mount Gambier tell the story of the giant Craitbul and his family who wandered about the area looking for a place to settle and live in peace. They camped and made ovens at Mount Muirhead and Mount Schank but were frightened away from both places by the moaning voice of a bird spirit. They managed to escape from the bird spirit by moving to Mount Gambier where they lived for a long time. Again they made an oven but one day water came up from beneath them and put out their fire. They made other ovens but these were also put out by water coming from beneath them. They made four ovens like this which are now the four craters of Mount Gambier.

 

Mt Schank

The one thing J really wanted to do on this volcano expedition was take the “adventurous track” down into the crater of Mt Schank. I knew immediately – that word “adventurous” – he'd be making the descent alone. However, I did walk (struggle would be a more appropriate word) up the white steps, stopping at each landing and castigating myself for unfitness as I took in the increasingly expansive view of limestone plains as I rose to 122 metres above sea level.

 

When I reached the rim, I could see J's tiny figure already almost at the bottom of the crater (later I discovered he'd already walked around the rim and spent ten minutes in an encounter with an echidna.) One side of the crater wall was vegetated, the other a bleak steep rocky wall. I began to walk around the narrow rim, glad of my walking stick on the rough track as land fell away from me on both sides. I enjoyed not trying to keep up, and settled myself on a rock to let my mind roam free and think about our journey so far. I heard footsteps and J appeared feeling triumphant. He'd not only negotiated “the adventurous track”, but clambered up the rocky face instead of retracing his steps.

 

Both Mount Gambier and Mount Schank have been classified as geological monuments by the Geological Society of Australia. This protects them against major changes from future development.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Rockhopping with experts

Tags

Bingie Residents' Group excursion

Last Sunday I joined a group of locals and two geologists to revisit sites I'd already scrutinised and theorised over. Having done my homework, I was entering a world that had become vaguely familiar. It was a delight to have the rock-story told fluently and coherently and a great relief to have the geologist's boot stomping on rocks he was talking about, and indicating on real rock the substance of his discourse.

A few snippets from that day

• I'm not the only one who has trouble imagining earth's time scale. 1 million years is about as far as the geologist can stretch: 500 million years is beyond even his capacity.
• Research into local geology, except for Bingie Bingie, is thin on the ground.
• Some of the rocks we encountered are heritage-protected.
• The mounds at Bingie Bingie Point, now covered by grass and other plants, are extensive middens: granite fissures were home to plentiful shellfish making this an ideal place for the feasting of the Ancestors.

• Everywhere are dikes, far more substantial than the ones we stumbled across on our first exploration.

 

• Here we are standing on Gondwanan rocks, where the earth folded under pressure.

 

• Here, a great chamber of magma created two different and incompatible granites. One lot of magma split, moved around an incompatible bit, and islanded it in an inconceivably-long-ago-then till now. The granite we are standing on extends down to the mantle.

 

Close by a whale surfaces and a pod of dolphins arch through the water. They are intruders, time travellers, drawing me back unwillingly into the future, away from long-ago earth processes that still continue today.

 

 

I'm off again till the end of November, on a camping volcano crawl through western Victoria. So there'll be silence till my return.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Eurobodalla beaches: Meringo and Congo North

Tags

basalt, Bingie Dreaming Track, Congo Beach north, cuttings, Meringo beach, silcrete, William Smith

William Smith, the English father of geology, mapped the underworld of the English landscape. His first interest in geology and the story it tells came as he descended slowly through the eons down a coal mine. His later mapping was made simple by the carving up of the landscape to build railways and canals; cuttings became a rich source of information. Following his example, our Sunday excursion began in a cutting documented in the notes for our November excursion with four geologists. There we found formations similar to the ones in the creek bed and cliffs at the southern end of Congo beach, confirming our diagnosis of basalt.

 

 

After scrutinising the cutting, we headed out to Meringo. Tides were all wrong this weekend, at least from my point of view, so I was keen to walk the length of high tide Meringo beach on a shady section of the Bingie dreaming track, behind overgrown and stabilised dunes. Huge bangalays overarched the sandy path, and we emerged at Meringo lagoon. It's one of a number of ICOLLs (intermittently opened and closed lakes and lagoons) on this part of the coast. It's currently closed by a sand bar, scattered with shallow pools left behind by the sea, and thick with shell-grit. We crossed it to reach the headland, where we again found formations like the ones in the creek on Congo beach.

 

 

We retraced yesterday's steps to the place of silcrete to photograph, and came across a flourish of purple which wasn't there yesterday. While Joe pursued silcrete, I crawled around trying to triumph over bright light, inadequate shadow, and the mysterious resistance of blue and purple to the camera. I collected a shell back tick for my trouble and plucked it off before it really got going in my shoulder. However, the photos were worth it: they've taken up residence in a separate post.

A black slither into the undergrowth beside the track was the first sighting of a snake, something we'd been expecting for the last two days.

 

 

We decided to picnic at Congo north and look at what we were convinced were sandstone cliffs. However, they startled us into incomprehension by having the same stone-wall appearance as the basalt at the south end of the beach.

 

 

We decided we'd been mystified enough for one day, and headed home, stopping three times: twice to indulge a newly-acquired interest in road cuttings and what they reveal, and once to photograph a road sign that unfurrowed our geologically tortured brows and made us smile.

 

 

 

Posted with Blogsy

Eurobodalla beaches: Congo beach south

Tags

basalt, Bingie Dreaming Track, Congo Beach South, Meringo Lagoon, Purple donkey orchid: Diuris punctata

A very different walk this time, not along the beach but along a bush track above the ocean, at least to begin with. Geologically, we were in search of basalt, silcrete and sandstone.

 

 

 

Sometimes the track was close to the water. We dropped over the edge briefly, to what appeared to be our first sighting of sandstone. In this new geological world, we lack all certainty, unless we have a named photograph of that particular rock formation.

 

 

An echidna made its way across in front of us, snout seeking out ants. It decided we were neither ants nor very interesting and pushed itself into the bank, presenting its rear end with neatly arranged gold-tipped quills for our inspection.

 

 

We finally followed, for once, an easy track down to the beach. We began by exploring a dry creek bed. There we found strange formations of rocks arranged almost like a freestone wall. We puzzled over them until we saw one with a chunk out of it, leaving shiny smooth fine grained black: almost certainly basalt. We were far less certain about the crumbly lower levels, with rounded rocks poking out.

 

 

Then we walked along the beach to rocks normally covered but now revealed because the sand has been cut away dramatically by high seas. They were puzzling. Some were obviously basalt, chipped away to a smooth black edge. Others were pocked right through. One presumably rogue piece, an escapee from somewhere else, looked like layered marble – if not rogue, then completely mystifying.

 

 

The rock platform, backed by bush partially hiding similar formations to those in the creek, was black basalt, lava flow in the Middle Oligocene Age, 28 million years ago (if we've read our notes correctly.)

 

 

We left the beach, and came to a headland giving us a spectacular view down the coast beyond Meringo towards Mullimburra and Cathedral Rocks. J found what he was sure were odd pieces of silcrete, some of them possibly shaped by Aboriginal tool makers. At pretty well the same place we saw signs of colonial occupation: an old post and rail fence, meticulous in its rough craftsmanship. We followed it to our end point, Meringo Lagoon, without finding either absolute geological certainty or the silcrete quarry that lies somewhere along the dreaming track.

 

 

As we headed back along the track to the car I spotted the climax of a diverse walk: a tall elegant orchid, with perfect flowers and very long sepals, against the background of the sea: Diuris punctata or the purple donkey orchid.

 

 

 

I'm linking this post to Jo's Monday walks. If you enjoy rambles all over the world, join her and others who combine blogging and an active life here.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Eurobodalla beaches: Bingie Beach North

Tags

Bingie Beach North, rock patterns

At this point on the coast, just south of Moruya, there seem to be more beaches than there are beach names. On Saturday we explored the rock platform below the Gray Rocks car park, and headed north, along what looked like a separate beach, to a castellated honeycombed area that seemed to be a natural beach divider. Beyond that was another sheltered beach where a family group were playing with a ball and dancing around in the water. However, my beach bible lumped all these individual beaches under the same name: Bingie Beach North.

On the south side of Grey Rocks, black volcanic outcrops glistened in sun and water. Across the beach nestling under a jaunty cap of bush, the boulders were very different: smooth mottled greys, browns and terracotta. We had no names for the rocks, but plenty of speculations.

Since I had on my rock hopping shoes (new and black and blue), I hopped out onto the rocks, keeping myself steady as I tried to photograph a wave breaking in its burst of spray. I didn’t dare leap over incoming water onto wet rocks, but it didn’t matter because I could walk up a wooden staircase, passing luxuriant pigface smiling at the weather as much as I was, and reach the same point from the other side. There I could debate with J whether the thick black streak humping through the rocks was a dike, and what process shaped it like that.

On the north side of the Grey Rocks headland, the rocks were decorated with a waxy patterning of marble-like quartz, and weed glowed with a copper light. Down its belly, one rock had a strange pattern like stitches after an operation.

The castellations at the other end of this beach were sharp and full of weathered niches. However they were interspersed with clumps of smooth rounded rocks. At one point on the rock platform this junction was very clear. The strangest formations were small caves with a peaked entrance and broken-stone lintels.

Then suddenly as we walked along the sand towards Cathedral Rocks, we were hauled into the present from 450 million years ago. The people on the beach were in fact friends, three of them Poles living in Canberra. So we stood in the sun discussing bilingual children, life in a country not your birth country, good places to visit in Poland and the Polish summer dry which allowed you to wade across the Wisła up to your shoulders. It was, somehow, a disconcerting encounter, meshing as it did two of our worlds.

Volcanic rock?

Spot the junction of two distinctive kinds of rock

– caves with broken-stone lintels

Posted with Blogsy