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!

Not hosts of golden daffodils

Tags

leaf skeleton, moss, purple / blue flowers, white flowers

One of my blogging friends, Tish, understood the nature of many Australian wildflowers when she said, in a comment on my last flower post “We’re not talking in-your-face ‘hosts of golden daffodils’ here. I suspect you have to do a bit of sleuthing and keeping your eyes peeled to come on all these lovely plants.” She was right. Many of the flowers featured in this post are tiny, and I need to keep my eyes slowly swivelling to spot them. Fortunately my default walking mode is slow: if I jogged I would see nothing.

This early morning flower walk began with a couple of macropods and their joeys, one with tail and paws dangling out of the pouch, ears finding a space around them; one watching me from the pouch with alert eyes. Then a movement in the bush turned into an emu, who took off in a hysterical ungainly leap when (s)he saw me.

The predominant flower colour on the headland in late September is white: creamy candles now taking on a cylindrical look; a flourishing of white flowers emerging from grass-like leaves under the twisted spotted gums; tiny many-petalled flowers in profusion on the ground; the hairy white flowers of the boobialla, berries not yet rich purple. A couple of bluey-purple Solanums offered a change of colour. Then there was a miscellanea of banksia cones, male toothed casuarina needles, curled monotoca leaves, the beginning of wattle pods, a madly budding and sunny-flowering hibbertia, and the exquisite filigree of a leaf skeleton.

The photographic triumph of the morning came towards the end of the walk. At last I've almost captured with clarity the miniature forest that is the flowering of moss. It was worth lying flat on the ground amongst potential leeches and ticks to capture the minute green cylindrical bobbles on slender red stems.

 

 

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