Teaching: a memoir

Tags

collaboration, consultancy, high school, mentors, university, volunteering

The beginnings

I always knew I wanted to be a teacher. Now I suspect it was largely because of the lack of alternatives offered to a girl of my background in the late 1950s. “Do you want to be a teacher or a nurse?” my headmistress asked a small group of girls assembled in her office for the conversation about our future at the end of our schooling.

By then I’d already been a teacher for a number of years, at the Sunday School I’d attended all my life. Each week I looked over the story for next Sunday – Moses in the bulrushes, Joshua and the battle of Jericho, Ruth and Naomi, Daniel in the lion’s den – and spent time figuring out how to tell it and what expression work (we’d call it craft now) would accompany it. In this, my first professional creative endeavour, I had a wonderful mentor, a dour unsmiling woman who took her role very seriously and generated amazing ideas week after week. My hatred of worksheets probably began then – she never succumbed to mere colouring in. Most of her ideas had three dimensions, and I developed a lifelong admiration for her.

I also got used to delivering papers at Christian Endeavour: ruminations on bible verses, or attempts at primitive theological discourse. My shyness disappeared when I had a public role, which is why the performance aspect of teaching rarely phased me later on.

Teaching at high school

So at the end of school I went to university on a Teachers’ College scholarship. My previous experience didn’t prepare me for the torture of delivering tutorial papers to my peers and tutors (including the terrifying young Germaine Greer). But I was at ease once I was in the class room, even as a student-teacher: massively over-prepared with fully scripted lesson plans, until I finally realised they were a hindrance, and what I needed was a direction, an outline and responsiveness to whatever happened during the lesson. So I stood in front of a class of boys at Epping High and Marsden High, with energy and conviction, and was launched into my teaching career. I’ve only got one bad memory of that time: I got impatient with a lad who was being a nuisance and sent him out, without realising that in those days out meant caned. I’m still remorseful about that.

Finally I had my own classes, at Fairfield Girls High School in Sydney’s west, once the badlands, but by the early 60s working class aspirational, where parents often had dreams far beyond the capacity or desires of their daughters.

I launched myself into my first encounter with year 9 by falling off the edge of the teacher’s platform. I was never much good at classroom management, and even in those days year nine was rowdy. Not so, the day the inspector came. They behaved like angels. After he left, they said “Gee miss, that lesson was really interesting”, but they didn’t draw the obvious conclusion: if they let me teach, I taught well.

For some reason the headmistress decided that this rookie teacher with no experience of teaching and very little of the world, should become the careers adviser. I had my own office, chaotic files and a student assigned to help me. First job was putting the files in alphabetical order, so my helper set to work. She was up to T before I realised she was arranging by first names. But that wasn’t the worst of being careers adviser. I was also a kind of default counsellor, never my métier. One Friday afternoon a suicidal student handed me pills wrapped in a handkerchief and said “I’m going to take these miss.” I managed to persuade her to let me have them, took them sceptically to a pharmacist, who said they were indeed a lethal dose.

In those days, I wore bright stockings, which didn’t impress the boss. When I was invited to an important careers meeting at a bank in the city, she said to me, “I presume you won’t be wearing those tomorrow.” She apparently associated my garb with a general lack of savoir faire, and also instructed me in how to eat oysters.

This was interesting teaching. I was only a few years older than my students and full of ideas. I invited them to a Shakespeare evening at my place, where my sister, their age, joined us. I took them away for a weekend just before their final exams to a holiday shack on Jervis Bay, visiting the home, chandeliered and grand-staircased, of one student to persuade her protective Mediterranean parents to let her come with us. There the toughest girl in the class demonstrated an unexpected terror of ants.

After two years, I applied for a country posting, the only person ever to ask to go to this school. There, I added Latin to my teaching repertoire, and fashionista to my personal attributes. I introduced, so I’m led to believe, both the maxi and the mini to Temora, while I presided over the dying of classical languages in the school curriculum. For the first and last time I lived so close to my workplace that I only had to cross the oval and I was there. I had battles with the English head teacher who took exception to a harmless humorous comment in the program. I can still see his face becoming redder and redder as I, young whippersnapper, challenged his fiat.

University teaching

Then there was a phone call from someone who claimed to be offering me a job in the Teacher Education Program at Macquarie University. I laughed and said “Quit fooling around”. It took Mr Dunkley some time to convince me that he was indeed the director of the TEP. Of course there was a job interview – after a sit-up overnight train trip by full moon from Temora. It was the first time I’d faced a panel: five men (my memory says they were all men) disposed around a long table with me, lonely, at the far end.

I got the job, and became an uneasy university lecturer, lacking all faith in my credentials and capacity. After all, I’d only been teaching for four years, and I not only had to teach trainee teachers and supervise their work in schools, but also to work with master teachers with five times my experience. I found again that I was good at putting together and critiquing teaching plans and programs, and that my head was fertile with teaching ideas. One document I put together about teaching effective speaking and listening was still being used years later. During the time at Macquarie, I wrote a quickly-remaindered text book, and a chapter in a book about teaching, and gave birth to my first child. I managed to continue working, and to breastfeed her, because my full-time academic load was eleven hours a week for twenty six weeks of the year, and my mother lived between my house and university.

As well as teacher education, I tutored in the school of English, mainly first year poetry, but also a ground-breaking cross-disciplinary course in children’s literature, involving the faculties of English, French, German and Psychology. This attracted mainly part-time students who were full-time teachers, so most of the tutorials were evening ones, when everyone had already expended their best energy. The academic tutorials didn’t give much scope for imagination but the teaching ones did, and creative thinking gave me huge pleasure.

A friend from university, a Marist brother teaching at St Joseph’s College, asked me to give literature tutorials to his final year students, for the women’s perspective he said. So every Thursday night I dressed in my woman’s perspective gear, and braved the sandstone grandeur of a Catholic boys’ school. They were eager, knowledgeable students. One night during a blackout, I sat around yarning, saddened by the sense of displacement the young men revealed under cover of darkness: many of them had been at boarding school since they were five. School offered little real social life, and when they went back to their vast properties in the bush, they were outsiders in the social life there. Many years later, my friend met one of the boys from that time who still remembered those evenings.

Part-time and casual teaching

When we moved to the south coast, I’d been teaching for six years at Macquarie, and ten years altogether. I resigned, and we built our house with my superannuation. But that wasn’t the end of my teaching career. I entered the edgy world of part time and casual work. I had my first experience teaching a kindergarten class and was daunted by their smallness, their innocence (“Miss, if you ring the bell, we’ll all be quiet”), and their lack of reading and writing skills.

I grew to dread the mornings, waiting for a call to come from a high school thirty minutes away to say “We need you today”. I hated the feeling of unpreparedness. I’ve never been good at trotting out a lesson. I think I learnt more than I taught in those days: a recalcitrant English student proved to be a meticulous carpenter who worked all lesson turning a leg for a table, and then discarded it because it wasn’t good enough. Catch him rewriting a sentence to make it better, or even correcting a spelling mistake! I saw discrimination against Aboriginal students, not by other students, but by the deputy principal. I discoved the difficulties of teaching children who were mates of my own kids and hanging around my place at the weekend. I found out how unsatisfactory it was not to have continuity and my own class, sometimes not even my own subject.

At the same time, I was tutoring at the Aboriginal homework centre, watching little kids developing a pride in their Aboriginality. Building up literacy skills that were somehow missed in the early years was difficult, frustrating and saddening. Some of these students went on into a golden future, but not many.

Then I moved briefly into the TAFE sector, teaching a variety of short-term courses, for women returning to work, or people setting up small businesses. Sometimes I had to put together the course plan and staff it in a week. I felt out of my depth and fraudulent – there wasn’t much of a workforce in our part of the world to return to, and small businesses tended to fold nearly as soon as they started up.

My most substantial and satisfying teaching was in a couple of courses for Aboriginal students: basic education, and then tertiary preparation. I taught history and literacy, and learnt a lot about Aboriginal history and disadvantage through stories students told about their lives. One of my treasured memories is a written correspondence with one of my students in his early twenties who had minimal literacy skills. He’d write two lines, I’d write three and so it went on till he was writing a page. He came to class after an early shift on the garbage trucks, excited by the finds of the day. He invited me to go on the truck with him and one of my great regrets is that I didn’t do it. Eventually I was running this course, and my TAFE career, along with those of a few colleagues, ended ignominiously in a sacking over poorly kept rolls. My file was marked “Never to be employed by this college again.”

High school again

At the same time my marriage was ending ingloriously, so I wasn’t as mortified by this sacking as I may have been, and as it turned out it cleared the way for my Broken Hill adventure. I applied for teaching jobs in a variety of challenging places (Wilcannia, Bourke, Walgett), and the gods gave me Broken Hill, a perfect place to discover what I really enjoyed and to stretch my post-marital wings. The huge downside was separation from my two sons.

The school had a few innovations that inspired me. My year 11 class was a mix of the lads (young men not all that keen on school) and mature age students, mainly women, who were old enough to be their mothers, and acted like it when the lads became unruly: “Don’t fool around. We didn’t finish school and we regret it.” There was also Day 6, a day when normal classes were suspended and teachers offered whatever took their fancy. For me, over my six years at Willyama, that included writing workshops, women’s studies, calligraphy, paper making, and a vaguely philosophical session called “Who am I?” For one term, when there weren’t enough takers for my offerings, I supervised “Beauty and you”, run by an unreliable beautician and totally ungroomed me.

The teaching was challenging, although it was the first time I’d had my own classrooms since I’d had my own kids, and that made a difference. The school bordered on the regen area, a strip around the town set aside for regrowth thanks to the forward-thinking efforts of Albert Morris in the 1930s. I took groups out there a few times on writing excursions (my idea) or to provide opportunities for smoking (theirs). The focus was a haiku scavenger hunt: bring back a haiku about sky, smells, colours, tiny, soft, dead, sharp. One education week, when Gabrielle Dalton was writer-in-community, we set up a stall in the shopping centre. Passers-by gave a topic to our team of writers as they went off to shop, and came back to collect the piece they’d inspired when they’d filled their trolley.

At a party, I entered into animated conversation with a young man, and in my cups, searching for conversation, said I wrote. He rang me on Monday, informed me he was principal of the School of the Air, and asked me to be writer-in-residence when he brought together isolated students for a few days on a couple of the remote stations, north of White Cliffs and west of the Adelaide road. Some of the students arrived by the family small plane, far more economical than a car over long distances on rough roads: Dad did the School of the Air run and was home in time for a day’s work. I became the Word Woman, dressed in a coat festooned with my favourite words (sanguine, obelisk, bergamot, valley, maniac, whirligig, quell) and wearing my confidence-giving beret. We wrote sprawled on the concrete path in the shade, and my photos show considerable intentness and pencil chewing. One day it was too windy outside so we retreated to a shearing shed, where my powerful voice competed with the rattling and banging of loose corrugated iron, but we managed to create a few characters out of a patchwork of words. Mind you, enthusiasm for writing lost out a bit to activities with the athletic young man conducting a cricket clinic.

A writing camp for students in the Living Desert near Broken Hill’s sculpture site, organised by the school librarian, gave me a chance to watch the performance poet Komninos at work, reading his poems and encouraging the kids into their own rap poetry as they sat amongst the sharp rocks, against the blue sky, or around the campfire under the stars.

Back to the ordinary classroom, away from all these trimmings! There are many sharp memories.

The recalcitrant lad with a truckie dad who produced a great radio program about trucking – information about the trucking life, stories, songs, all threaded on his laconic commentary. When I praised him he said defiantly, “That’s it, miss. Don’t expect anything else, ever.”

The Year 12 genius with words and black pen sketches who nearly set fire to the school during an early morning discussion on the Gothic novel. His atmospheric candles burnt down to the desk while we were focused on his explication of The castle of Otranto.

A long, extermely intelligent discussion about Shakespeare with a fifteen year old, who, in class, crawled around under the desks and caused concentration mayhem.

A Year 10 drama class (drama is not my strength) who informed me in the first lesson that they were going to give me a nervous breakdown. One day I left their class near tears on a totally unrelated matter (menopause looming? wedding anniversary?) The day after, there were flowers and cards with rhymes of apology on my desk.

A disturbance at the back of the same classroom: one of the few really unpleasant students I ever encountered laying his penis on the desk for consideration.

A vital assessible task from a Year 12 student, whose psychologist thought it would be useful to talk about her cousin’s murder. A mark out of 15, for that?

Then of course there were all those students who did as I asked, contributed to discussion, didn’t scribble on walls, read texts, handed in assignments, and learnt from my teaching. And there were all those days when I came home distraught after chaotic classes wondering what I was doing with my life.

But the greatest teaching challenge in Broken Hill was probably co-presenting a full day of teacher development to my peers and colleagues. This was a prelude to my next job.

Literacy consultant

My time as a Broken Hill high school teacher came to an end after six years, when I headed back to the coast to take up a position as a literacy consultant, covering the territory from Nowra to the NSW / Victorian border, and out beyond the Great Divide to Delegate, Bombala, Bibbenluke, Ando and Braidwood.

Once again I was beyond my level of expertise: most of my work was in primary schools, and I was a high school English teacher. But the training I received, for once, was excellent. My job was teacher training, but the boss believed in saturation so I became a consultant-in-residence, spending up to twenty days in one school, running workshops for teachers, but also working with them in their classrooms: all the pleasures of teaching, without having to manage classes.

The best times were when the teacher and I worked magically together, feeding off each and building something interesting and lasting. My nights alone in motels were spent creating teaching materials and building on the work students had done that day: word ribbons with useful conjunctions or prepositions; the longest paragraph in the world on a scroll (I’ll never forget the gasp as those 8 year olds saw what they had written unfurl from ceiling to floor); spectacular complex sentences about Antarctica where knowledge transformed grammar; letters to Santa, where precision really mattered, from kindergarten students ; a narrative about a fairy and a tiger, and the ferocious resistance of 7-year-olds to the idea of making the tiger the goodie and the fairy the villain (they won). Plenty of teachers didn’t want me anywhere near them, and blatantly dozed in staff meetings, but I like to think that at least some teaching became more effective because of my work. At least now, in my 50s, I knew a bit about pedagogy.

I had a few other great collaborative experiences during these six years. One was with the technology adviser, who set aside Fridays for consultant education. Some of the time we spent together was me learning stuff I knew I wanted to know, and some with him saying, “I reckon you might like to be able to do this.”

One was with the maths consultant who asked me to sit in on a maths class she was teaching, and suggest how she could improve maths teaching by paying attention to words as well as numbers.

But the best one was at the field studies centre in Bournda National Park, where the boss wanted to merge writing and the environment: bush, lake, marsh, sea. I roughed out possible writing challenges and then talked to Ross, who knew Bournda inside out. He became the location scout, and a superb job he did. We lived a chase sequence in the undergrowth, before writing it, me weaving my way at wriggle level with the much smaller and lither primary school kids. Then we went on a noise walk, over the crackling twig-litter, the squelchy marsh verge, the soft sandy tracks under the casuarinas by the lake and down to the sonorous ocean, writing a quite splendid communal sound poem.

 

Retirement

Restructure loomed. A colleague had a heart attack. My contract was up for renewal. I’m frugal, and had enough money. So I retired.

I spent a year not teaching, and then set myself up as a private consultant. The agony of deciding on a price when I’d always been paid a wage! And the agony of wondering if I was worth the price I put on myself! I loved this teaching, and did some really good work when I could focus and wasn’t trying to run seven projects at once. There was a workshop over a couple of days with reluctant boy writers, incorporating computers, and using the extensive playground for inspiration. This too was a productive collaboration – luckily my collaborator knew Apple. My last hurrah in the classroom was a two-day workshop for talented writers from a number of schools, one of the best and most thorough things I ever did.

For three years after that, I wrote teaching ideas for the NSW school magazine, four sets of ideas ten times a year, well-paid until I divided dollars by hours. However, the money wasn’t the whole story. I loved coming up with new ideas, and did more professional reading in those years than I’d done since teachers’ college. I had to produce worksheets, so I stretched my brain to produce ones I could live with.

 

Back to university

My final teaching fling was the worst teaching experience ever. Tutor for an hour a week for a semester to Dip Ed students, literacy across the curriculum? A piece of cake. A doddle. A walk in the park! Not quite. Not at all. Oh, by the way you’ll be videconferencing the tutorial (a videoconferenced tutorial?) to two other venues. So my cosy little tutorial group is now spread over 260 kilometres and out into the unreliability of cyberspace. A sigh and the acceptance of a challenge: and such it proved to be – time spent connecting, and then reconnecting after disconnection.

But all that was possible. The lecturer wasn’t. Her background was special needs, an area covered in other courses. This one required someone to offer ways of developing literacy skills in high school subjects. So I had to tweak my tutorials away from her lectures, which most students hadn’t heard anyway because they were online, and online in these rural communities was often difficult. Then it was time for the first assignment, and I got panicky questions from students: “What exactly are we supposed to do?” The assignment was incoherent and incomprehensible. So I rewrote it, and then had to negotiate my way out of directly insulting the lecturer. By now, this one hour was chewing up most of my week. When the course ended, I sought an interview with the course overseer and expressed my concerns. She said, “OK, we’ll pay you to rewrite the course.” Once I’d done that, in consultation with one of the other tutors, she said, “How about being a guest lecturer in the course next year?” I ran, screaming refusals, into the calm of full retirement.

 

Volunteering

But it’s hard to just stop teaching. I dabbled a bit in volunteering at high school, but I wasn’t easy with what they wanted us to do, so after a deep soul-search I withdrew. Then I found a pleasant volunteer-home at the Aboriginal pre-school, where I read stories, and crawled around on the floor amongst blocks, and played with plasticine, and wrote up things I’d noticed about the kidlets, and chatted with them. This lasted till Warsaw intervened.

Now my main teaching role is talking English to two little Poles.

This is the last one in my series of selective memoirs: they’ve given me a chance to reflect on a number of things that have been important to me over a span of years, but they’ve also confused time for me a bit, by taking me away from the present.

 

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Writing: a memoir

Tags

ecstasy, writing communities

I’ve dabbled in writing from the time I was in primary school. One Christmas my beloved aunts gave me a book with a blue mottled pseudo-leather cover, and a small perfumed biro, and I began my first serious diary. My writing in those days was stilted, banal and cliched, a child’s attempt to capture experience in large neat letters, without the verbal resources that would make it sparkle. I submitted earnest pieces to the Argonauts club (I was Mykonos 11) on ABC radio, and I always got good marks for Composition.

High school put a stop to frivolous writing: my pen poured out essays on the continental system and Macbeth, and reports on vaguely understood science experiments, and Latin proses. The only remotely creative thing I remember writing was a book on Antarctica, complete with dust jacket, index, a blurb by my mother (“This author will go far”) and pages beautifully hand-printed and illustrated with black ink and a mapping pen. University stymied creativity even further: five years churning out acceptable stuff that earned me credits and distinctions and, eventually, first class honours.

When my own children were little, I began to go to local writing workshops: one on journalism, one on writing poetry. My experiences living in the bush with a growing family were netted in letters to my mother, and in a journal I kept as we were settling into the rural life and building our house. Four children didn’t leave much time for thoughtful writing. Minutes and reports for parent groups, and for a few years regular contributions to a weekly column on education for parents in the local paper: that was about it, except for an occasional confessional diary, dynamite waiting to explode.

As my marriage crumbled around me, I met a man who wanted a ghost writer for his hitch-hiking stories. He was living in a hut along the Nerrigundah road. I’d go to his place when the kids were asleep, and he’d dictate, I’d question and record on tape, then go home and transcribe, trying desperately to keep his voice. The road answers back grew, but it was far too episodic and disconnected and I didn’t know how to shape it otherwise. I persisted and finally delivered a manuscript. Writing it gave me one of my very few writing ecstasies: a moment of ebullient solitary delight that had me hopping on my pushbike and pedalling downhill from the house, shrieking my head off. Not a state of mind that was altogether comfortable, for me or the neighbours.

Then, I moved to Broken Hill. Suddenly I was no longer chief cook and bottle washer. I had time for myself. The daughter who lived with me was an independent fifteen year old with a separate entrance. One of my new friends was a writer. Writers came to town, and I became connected with any writing community going. Gabrielle Dalton arrived to winkle out stories from different groups, including local bikies. Under her influence I wrote about my experience of a sweat lodge and read it on local radio, not even thinking that students might hear it: “Was that really true, miss?”

Elizabeth Mansutti came to research women’s role in the big miners’ strike of the 1890s. I had the first inkling of what I wanted to do when I retired when I saw her reading 19th century newspapers, a confetti of decomposition rising, even while she handled them with fine care. My project of researching my mother’s birth year was born as I watched her.

My second experience of writing-ecstasy was far quieter than the first. It came in the middle of the night as I sat up in bed writing a free verse account of a holiday trip to the Flinders Ranges: the walk to St Mary Peak; the stroll up Bunyeroo Gorge; the encounter with a powerful stump; the wild night of wind that people were still talking about years later.

My hitch hiking friend came to visit, and at a wishes picnic on my living room floor the Broken Hill writers’ group was formed, and continues still, I think. We met regularly, shared writing, did quick- writes during the meetings and encompassed a variety of people writing about boxing, sailing, family history: it never became quite a community of writers, but it kept me writing regularly, one piece a rumination on a guitar-playing Noah who left Mrs Noah to do all the hard work. I wrote a few love poems in that post-marital chaos that aren’t too bad, all things considered.

The Broken Hill years ended and I returned to the coast. My interest in writing continued, following much the same path: workshops, writers on writing, desultory pen to paper. My most productive time was during weekly writing for Lomandra, a small online community of artists, where I had an audience and a discipline. I had occasional spurts of half-hour writes in my motel rooms when I was on the road as a consultant, which offered me a pale version of ecstasy, this time arising from that mystery in writing: beginning and not knowing where it will take you. I stumbled across such a piece years later, and thought my daughter had written it. I was envious: “She writes so well. I could never write like that”, and suddenly I realised that it was mine.

After I retired, I began the research inspired by Elizabeth Mansutti amongst newspaper flocculence in the Charles Rasp library. What began as my mother’s story through her birth year, became my great uncle’s war experience when I found a pile of his letters to my grandmother, and his two leather bound war diaries. That research produced a series of factional cameos, based on things from his letters that really captured my imagination. I wrote a rather cranky essay On sacrifice, irritated by blithe use of the word by people far from mud and death, as if it was a willed thing. This writing episode culminated in a short profile of my two great uncles for a family history book.

And now of course, there’s blogging.

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 PUBLISHED WRITING

This is a bit tongue in cheek, but I am in fact pleased with all of these publications for different reasons. I really don’t mind being world-famous in Omsk.

 

In print

A Year 7 text book for English

A chapter in a book about teaching

Regular columns in the local paper about education

A short piece in the Sydney Morning Herald about returning to teaching after twenty years

Two 500 word profiles of my great uncles in a family history called “The Smalls at war”

Teaching ideas to accompany the NSW School Magazine: about 30 issues

Reviews of books for the Teacher-Librarians magazine: professional books and children’s books

A free verse rappy account of the writing camp in the Living Desert with the poet Komninos, also published in the magazine for teacher librarians

On radio

A piece about my experience in a sweat lodge which I read on air myself

A piece about memorable meals and landscapes on a Radio National lifestyle program

Speeches /talks – all carefully crafted, especially the two minute one!

A lecture to a theatre full of high school students on Shakespeare

A two minute speech launching a book about education in the Eurobodalla

A 2 hour talk about travelling alone through Syria and Jordan for U3A

A twenty minute presentation to my consultancy colleagues about life as a country literacy consultant

A ten minute speech launching a friend’s poetry anthology

Online

For ABCOpen, a program to encourage regional writers

Aunty Min: a person who influenced me

Being in Warsaw without language

Finding native orchids in the Eurobodalla

Travel blogging

Blogging

And then the floodgates opened when I discovered blogging! 750 posts since I began my own blogs in 2011.

Prizes

A short story, based on my World War 1 research, commended in the Henry Lawson competition 2008

Champion: craft – writing at the Eurobodalla show, 2011 for a poem called “My mother’s hands”

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Photography: a memoir

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photography

Yes. As a child I did have a Brownie box, and I have a few albums of greyscale photos from that time, usually taken on special occasions because they were so expensive to develop. There is my brother, halfway down the Giants’ Staircase at Katoomba, looking up as if he’s hearing the voices of angels; the minister from our church in a big sand-hole at the beach with fingers up like devil’s horns; one of my school friends crouching down at dusk with the water rippling round her and a boiled spud in her hand, on a biology excursion at Narrabeen; Dad in swimmers and a vast Mexican sunhat with his arm around mum on a Jervis Bay holiday.

The Brownie box disappeared, and I didn’t own another camera until the 1990s. All the photos of our offspring were taken by my father, so many things a gap because he only visited a few times a year.

Then, when I was living in Broken Hill, I met the art teacher. He was a photographer, and after I’d seen his shots of old machinery and sunflower skeletons (copies now hanging at the entrance to my house), I became interested. Every weekend I’d borrow the school camera, and see what I could find. Eventually in 1996 I bought a camera for myself, a golden one, that captured my experiences in Broken Hill, Egypt, Jordan and Syria, with varying degrees of success. My fiftieth birthday gathering at dawn on the Sundown Trail; my daughter, dressed up for her year 10 formal; the strange hollow stump that exuded power in the Flinders; my beloved purple and green tent, and my beloved corrugated iron house, garden and bookcases under construction; a guest pulling a giant bread and butter pudding out of the oven; the oasis and the desert at Siwa; an antique flatbread in the Cairo museum; the view from the Pinnacles and Mundi Mundi; endless spectacular outback sunsets; the broken pot from the time of King Solomon in the trench at the Pella dig; the family in the Dead Cities with an entrepreneurial 8 year old son; Palmyra seen through mist early on New Years Day; the vast wooden water wheels and the elegant palace in Hama; the mosaics of Madaba; the rock face of the siq at Petra; the demanding landscapes of Wadi Rum. I have a bookcase full of albums that need drastic culling or scanning.

Then my photographic life changed forever. By the time I retired, I was using my 3 megapixel Konica Minolta, with its German lens and its glowing palette. By then nothing was safe from my photographic scrutiny: landscape, bark, shells, flowers, sea, sky, even occasionally people. The digital world had arrived and I could shoot to my heart’s content: my first three month’s supply of photos would have cost me more than $1000 to have developed and printed. Now I could edit out the junk and save everything non-spatially. I developed a new routine: walk, photograph, return home, download, edit, name, save, and clear the card ready for the next excursion. A tripod became an occasional companion, but I found that mostly I could get the plant, seaweed and shell shots I wanted by crouching or lying flat on my face.

And there you have it. I became photo-obsessive. I loved my camera and it returned my love by taking splendid photos. It even adjusted for wind-woggle. I documented my territory: headland, beach, rock pools, cliffs and bush. I began to know the whereabouts of particular plants, and mourn the loss of the hakea, the banksia spinulosa, the geebung, which fell victim to fire hazard reduction. My files from this camera include my first retirement flower shot, a fringe lily; the cycles of casuarinas and banksias; wattle pods and flowers; the minute zieria; donkey orchids and bearded orchids; schelhammera spurting pollen; spotted gum bark in all its transformations; shells and grains of sand; rock pools and their denizens; and the endless exquisite patterns of the rock face. My failures? The spray of the breaking wave; the three dimensions of the hyacinth orchid; the dimness of the rainforest.

But the Konica’s a bit big for travelling light. I invested in a Fuji cheapo, 12 megapixels. It’s not so good on close up, and its colour tends towards blue, but it’s small and convenient. Its first outing was a rushed trip to Stanthorpe for my daughter’s birthday. It proved itself to be a great shooter from the train window: I expected an impressionistic blur, and I got clarity, and new subject matter. I now have a collection of photos through glass from bus, car, train, tram, plane, cable car, and boat.

Then my Warsaw daughter announced that she was having twins, and life tilted on its axis. If I was going to travel overseas, I needed a smaller camera and a good one, so I bought my Sony Cybershot, all 21 megapixels of it, to record a new city and new descendants. It was small and convenient, croppable, and also not so good on closeups. It walked snowy streets, and eagerly photographed long icicles hanging from the doors, intricate plasterwork, doors and windows, and babies. Photos filled my iPad to capacity, and became the default mode of my blogging, taking over from words.

When we began boating, I took J’s faithful old camera on the maiden voyage: I fell in and drowned it. So the first Fuji became his, and I bought another cheap Fuji for a dedicated boating camera. It captured movies of our first rowing adventures, reflections in the river, trees and forest on the banks. But not the tiger snake (or python) swimming towards us, or the cow stuck in the mud, or the hoons in over large fast boats, or us dragging the boat onto the back of the ute. Once the sail went up, the camera stayed at home. Sailing is like walking dogs or two-year-olds: it needs all your attention, even when you just have to sit.

My interest in photography generated other interests. I wanted to know the names of the plants I was photographing, so a photographic session included time with a local plant ID book, conveniently colour-coded for the novice. My interest in art drifted over into the composition of my photos – horizontals and diagonals particularly. I went to exhibitions of photos; Ansel Adams and the absolute clarity of every blade of grass; Bob Brown, then leader of the Australian Greens, and his splendid capturing of the light and dimness of rainforest; and more recently the collection at the Cairns Regional Gallery, tracing the history of photography. I devoured articles about photography in Artonview, the magazine of the National Gallery of Australia, and in the MoMA newsletter and I finally, after many years of meaning-to, read Susan Sontag On photography, with which I’m in ongoing argument.

Now I don’t step out the door without my camera, sure that if I do there’ll be a man riding a cow along the Potato Point road, or a line of emus striding across the beach casting their shadows, or an echidna swaying its way across the road, or twins hugging each other, or shadows falling a particular way. The thing about photography is that you only have one chance. Miss it and it’s gone forever.

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Blogging: a memoir

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blogging

What began years ago as a dabble, has become an obsession. When I’m away from home I spend more time blogging and conversing with blogmates, than I do emailing friends at home, and the argument that they can read my blog if they want to keep in touch is flimsy.

How did this addiction develop, and why do I indulge it? My first experience of blogging was with a small closed group, friends from the bush who used to go out every Sunday and paint with a glass of wine close by. When they scattered they decided to continue with virtual Sunday afternoons, maintaining the real paint and the real wine, and posting the results in the blogosphere. I was a friend of one of the group, who invited me to join. I became the token writer, and very prolific and diverse my writing was too, even only devoting a few Sunday hours to it: haiku, reviews, anecdotes based on stories of my mother’s life, photo essays. I learnt the importance of substantial comment there too, and a lot about art as I struggled to say something not too ignorant about their paintings and sketches. The commitment by everyone faded as life overtook us all, and Lomandra languishes.

My second foray into the land of blogging languishes too. It was a wordless photographic blog, with no visitors except myself, an occasional visitor when I want to scavenge a photo. I had a few good ideas that transplanted in part to morselsandscraps and snippetsandsnaps. The plant life of my south coast home was my photographic focus and I began to keep a monthly archive of plants spotted. I was interested in being a tourist on my own turf, and discovering the hinterlands of my normal routes around my territory, and there are some lovely discoveries in these hinterlands. I also did portrait galleries – many photos of the same plant. Not many posts altogether, but a record of a phase, the awakening of my interest in botany, and my first personal blog.

My current blogging career had an ignoble genesis: competition with my daughter. In 2011 she arrived in Warsaw after an eighteen-month cycling marathon from Tokyo, through central Asia, blogging all the way, don’t ask me how. Then she began to record her life as an expat in Warsaw. I was curious, and thought “If she can do it, why not me?”, failing to take into account the fact that she has done many things I wouldn’t even contemplate in my wildest dreams. Oh, and I also wanted to keep up the writing impetus from Lomandra days.

And so it began, that insidious controlled beginning of what has become a full-bodied addiction. Why do I do it? What are its pleasures? Why do I feel the need to audit and justify my time spent in the blogosphere? I swear that I began blogging with absolutely no thought of followers, or even readers. I wanted to write: a record of my days; occasional reviews of books, movies, and exhibitions; an ongoing tribute to the beautiful place where I live; whatever took my fancy. I wanted to craft my writing and shape my experiences. Photos gradually became a vital part of the blog, in fact sometimes they even cannibalised it. Occasionally friends and family read me, and very occasionally they would comment.

Then the whole scene changed. I met Christine in the blogosphere, a real world neighbour as well. It was fascinating to read her blog and see her vision of the world only about 20 kilometres from me up the coast. She commented thoughtfully and faithfully, and so a conversation began, which we continued over too few coffees and lunches. Through her, I encountered Jo and Gilly and Madhu, and the net spread – Jude, Paula, Pauline, Tish, Elissaveta, Sara, Suzanne, Sue, Desleyjane. Suddenly I’m sharing the worlds of women from England, India, Croatia, Australia, Bulgaria, Ethiopia, Portugal and Poland. I’m engrossed in their accounts of their culture, their travels, their food, their love of walking and plants, their families, their spiritual journeys, their adventures, their spectacular photos, their writing. Why wouldn’t I spend far too long every day talking to these women and being inspired by them? I learn, I’m challenged, I’m warmed by their affection. I ramble off checking out people in their blogging communities, and the day fades.

Each time I visit Warsaw I begin a new blog to store and share my experiences on the other side of the world. Blogging was my lifesaver when I was housebound for six weeks on my first visit, and that’s when I learnt most of what I know about blogging, just by poking around. One day when I dared to audit time spent in the blogosphere, I wrote ten comments; read eight new posts; had five sessions writing or working over new posts. That took me four and a half hours. And that horrified me a bit.

But whenever I have a crisis about the value of blogging, I seem to get an email from P, recently moved to a retirement village because of the state of her partner’s health, saying things like “your lovely blogs … still have the effect of centring me momentarily in the sanity of your worlds. I cling to them for sanity, for beguiling photography and lucid lovely writing. Its not the insanity here that gets me down. Its the inanity, it descends like a mental gloop or glug, suffocating flights of any fancies free.” Last night, my son said “I’ve read a few of your blogs. The ones about us of course, and the snow ones, but also the Nerrigundah road ones. I think I’ll read more.” To be known a bit more by my son is a pleasure indeed. And then of course there are the friendships in the blogosphere, the shared lives, the gentle jokes, the varied viewpoints, the warmth, the concern.

My son recently convinced me of the fascination of stats: he cycles using an app which tells him how far, how steep, how fast. So, a few stats since I began morselsandscraps in 2011. I’ve written 720 posts on my six blogs. Comments, written and received, have escalated from 376 on morselsandscraps over three years, to 2020 on snippetsandsnaps since August 2014. I now have a solid and dependable community of friends, with whom I talk frequently, and a richer life. Thank you, all my readers.

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Swimming: a memoir

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swimming

It's the 1950s, in the days before municipal swimming pools in every suburb. I'm 8 years old, catching the train by myself to swimming lessons at North Sydney Olympic Pool. I walk into the chlorine smell, change into my elasticised swimmers, and head out to the tiled surrounds of the pool. I don't dive in – I never mastered diving. My method is to back down the ladder and lower myself into the chill of the water. The lessons begin – breathing, kicking, arm movements, coordinating all three into an ungainly overarm, duck diving, floating, treading water. Learning whatever I now know about movement through the aquatic world.

At high school we went swimming in the suspicious slimy depths of the Roseville pool. You could never see the bottom, and you always wondered what lurked there. In memory, we never swam on a sunny day. The weather was always as murky as the water. There, the teachers finally accepted a clumsy forward topple into the water as the best I could do.

Ocean swimming was rare in my childhood. We lived a long way from the sea and didn't own a car. Occasionally I'd go with the neighbours to the enclosed sea pool at Balmoral, or to Narrabeen for the Sunday School teachers' picnic. I'd submerge myself briefly in the waves, rise and fall with the swell, and then head off to the beach to collect a painful sunburn that made me wince every time I moved for days afterwards. Even on our Jervis Bay holidays I didn't spend much time in the water. I think I was always a bit fearful of the sea, and much easier in the still water of lakes and rivers.

Expecting our first child, we criss crossed the great divide heading towards Lightning Ridge. I remember a naked romp amongst a rocky outcrop at Crescent Head; a lounge in a bath-shaped rock in a mountain stream; an icy submerge in the pool at the bottom of a waterfall. We had all these places to ourselves, inconceivable forty years later.

The move to the south coast gave us a gentle river not far from home, with safe places for children to splash about, and pools where my feet could rest on the bottom whenever I wanted. In that river, we bathed, and cooled down on summer days, and lolled about looking at the stars on hot summer nights. None of this probably qualifies as swimming, but it is playing around in the water.

There was also the sea close by. My dislike of the ocean was confirmed one day when I watched my ten year old daughter swept around the rocks in a rip on her surfboard. My attempt to rescue her was a disaster – I was hurled onto the rocks and cut about, while she confidently rescued herself. I've lived by the sea now for 15 years and rarely immerse myself, except when I'm nagged into it. Fortunately it's not wasted because my son spends every spare minute taking advantage of it.

There was a spell where I swam at the Narooma breakwater regularly on shopping day, and occasionally, in my lunatic phase, at night after yoga. One day I froze as I had a riveting conversation, standing up to my neck in icy water, with a female pilot. My only attempt at body surfing was also near the Narooma breakwater, on a rare day when the waves broke inside. My teenage daughter launched me on the waves and I felt for once the exhilaration of shooting shoreward on the crest. I've never managed to read waves well enough to replicate this for myself.

Swimming overseas? Paradoxically, in a desert pool at the oasis in Siwa in Egypt. The area was small, the banks not far away, and I lolled about quite contentedly. There's even a photo to prove it. Maybe I even did a few desultory overarm strokes, and a lazy breaststroke or two. In the thermal baths in Budapest, where men stood chest deep playing chess. In the lake at Gryżyna in western Poland, surrounded by forest and an avenue of monument trees, and kept in line by strutting lifesavers.

I've had a few dips in the women's pool at Coogee in Sydney, a relaxed place where you clamber down a rocky staircase and slide into a roughly shaped pool amongst the rocks. On a rough day the swell rolling in can be quite daunting, but on calm days the water is salty-buoyant, and the world far above. I stroke out unenergetic laps, and even wonder why I don't seek out water for such pleasures more often.

Swimming is obviously a pitifully small part of my life story. Why write a memoir about it? Because being in the water has given me pleasures I've felt nowhere else, and reminiscing has taken me to memories I cherish, even if they are few and far between.

 

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Walking: a memoir

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Broken Hill, Dahab, Flinders Ranges, Nadgee wilderness, NSW South Coast, Snowy Mountains, walking

This post was inspired by Elissaveta's beautifully written accounts of her far more intrepid walks into the mountains in Switzerland and the Balkans

After reading her posts, I began by thinking regretfully, “I've never really walked” and then made a list, discovering that I'd walked a fair bit. Hence this lengthy post.

 

I've always walked, just not as much or as far as I wish I had: I am a desultory walker, as I am a desultory most things. However, I in fact have a walking history in many places: bush and beaches; rainforest; the Gulf of Aqaba; south coast wilderness; city streets; red desert.

 

AS A CHILD …

As a child, I went bush walking with Girl Guides and with the social group of my church: to Bobbin Head, Lane Cove Park, Royal National Park; in the Blue Mountains, and down the escarpment from Heathcote, carrying a small backpack and a packed lunch. I wasn't very sporty but I enjoyed these walks and the intensity of adolescent relationship that seemed to accompany them. My attention wasn't really on the bush: that came later.

AS A STUDENT …

As a student, I walked a few kilometres to and from the station every day, my nose buried in a book. At high school, I learnt the whole of The rime of the ancient mariner as I walked: many stanzas remain lodged in my otherwise sieve-like memory. As I paced out that distance twice daily, I also read the four volumes of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, the longest novel in the English language. I am one of the few people in my known universe to have done so.

However, walking diminished as study took over and exacted a sedentary life in return for high marks. In retrospect this was a very dubious bargain.

 

AS A YOUNG TEACHER …

As a young teacher, I embarked on an overnight hike (here the language changes: it was definitely not a walk) in the Snowy Mountains. I have vivid spot-memories of this experience. I remember getting out of the car in a valley surrounded by mountains; hefting my borrowed back pack onto my shoulders; taking five steps; and thinking “What have I let myself in for?” I couldn't abort, so I continued, becoming oddly friskier as the day progressed, somehow drawing perverse energy from the twisted ankles and encroaching exhaustion of my fellow hikers. Our guide kept saying “The hut's over the next crest.” But it never was. Eventually, he owned up to being lost. My energy level soared. When we finally reached the hut – and we did, somehow – I was the only one who danced to our destination.

That night was cold, so cold we needed to get the porridge water and put it in the hut for the night. So I volunteered to go down to the creek with a man and a bucket, a creek hardly any distance from the hut. It was a dark night, but we reached the creek without any problems. However, when we turned to head back to the hut, there was no sign of its lights. After an anxious and increasingly cold half-hour we were reunited with our refuge and plied with brandy and foot rubbing to restore circulation.

We spent the next day pottering round the bleak rocky terrain, my companion a spelunker with a geological hammer, a delicious Scottish accent, a Viking name, and an unwelcome propensity for putting his hand on my knee. When we set off back to the cars, we encountered an unexpected barrier. Fire this time. The grass was alight and burning fierce but low. So we fire-jumped our way to safety, I again exhilarated. By now everyone was body weary and we booked into a hotel, tall and Gothic, where we staggered up five flights of stairs and sank into hot baths to ease our aches and fatigue.

This adventure unfortunately didn't lead me immediately to more overnight hikes. That had to wait until I was well into my 50s.

 

COURTSHIP WALKS

Four walks stand out in my memory from courtship days. There was a city walk, after a classy dinner at the Rocks: a stroll around through Hyde Park, past the Archibald fountain, down to the foreshores of Sydney Harbour under the looming shape of the Harbour Bridge. The palm trees were clacking in the wind and the air was balmy. We walked and talked – and canoodled – and missed the last train home.

There was a rock-hopping walk at Narrabeen, looking down into deep sea pools where the sea crashed in, and holding even deeper conversations about matters literary and philosophical. There was a walk through the sandstone bush down to a writers' house at West Head, where young poets and novelist gathered, some of them later becoming well-known names. That day our motor bike helmets were stolen from under the rock where we'd left them. And then there was a walk at Newnes near Lithgow, after a motorbike ride in summer sun, sunflowers nodding by the road and kookaburras laughing. We left the bike and walked through a tunnel dripping with water and alight with gloworms, to a flat rock overlooking a deep gulley, where we sprawled and talked about Somerset Maugham.

AS A MOTHER …

I walked a bit in the bush near our south coast home with my children, sometimes carrying sausages, bread and matches for a bush barbecue. We occasionally stumbled across mossy logs and creeks, later recognised tiny rainforest patches. These walks were complex – one son was not a walker and the rest were always miles ahead. On one memorable occasion we hiked up Pigeonhouse (Didhol or Didthul to the Aboriginal owners). I can remember in my body the giant staircase of rock, and then the buzzing-and-butterfly-fluttering level heathland before the climb to the ladders leading to the rocky top. The children scampered up the ladders, but there was no way I would climb – too sheer, for my queasy height-sense and my trembling legs. So I sat below the peak and played Down in the valley on my recorder, until they returned, safe after unsupervised shiacking on the edge of a very long and unfenced drop.

Sometimes while everyone was at school I explored the forestry trails near home. I loved looking back at the house snuggled amongst trees on a far away ridge, and thinking gleefully “My feet brought me here.” I walked along tracks with intermittent views out to the Great Divide, and down into damp gullies. Sometimes I got lost, and once found myself walking an unintended twenty kilometre circuit.

One holiday when my sons came to Broken Hill we spent a week in the Flinders Ranges, where I embarked on another of my few 20 kilometre walks, to St Mary Peak (Ngarri Mudlanha), a sacred site for the local indigenous community who now ask that tourists don't visit it. My walking was interrupted as I fielded concern because I wasn't keeping up, and ended up telling everyone I'd go back if they didn't just forget me. So they raced ahead and I savoured. Until I came to an awkward rocky outcrop. I was ready to turn back, when a helpful man assured me I could do it, and waited until I did. I walked on, till I reached the last stiff incline, where I met the mob on the way down, J looking almost apoplectic in his attempt to keep up with his teenage son. Then there was the long walk down a rocky track through a festival of wild flowers and across Wilpena Pound. The sky darkened; branches creaked together eerily; footsteps lagged. The mile-markers were more depressing than encouraging, especially to my reluctant walker. We finally reached the car, exhausted and triumphant, especially J who was only a minute or two behind his son.

The next day everyone was stiff and sore. I left them sleeping and walked along Bunyeroo Gorge, through a wonderful soundscape of birds, frogs, clattering rocks and wind in the treetops.

Years later, when I visited my daughter in Egypt, we embarked on another long walk, this time from Dahab along the Gulf of Aqaba, looking across to the pale outline of the sparse hills of Saudi Arabia. We walked round rocky inlets, and up rocky tracks littered with toilet paper and turds, until finally we came to a cove where the water glimmered Tutankhamen blue and gold, and two men on camels rolled past, transistors blaring. For most of the journey my daughter was a figure in the distance ahead of me, staying just close enough for me to follow her. The return journey became a challenge, and by the time we reached the restaurant stretch I was fading with fatigue and stiff from unaccustomed exertion. We ate Bedouin food, Bedouin style on the floor, and rising from that position was evidence enough that I'd walked a very long way.

 

BROKEN HILL …

As a woman returning to teaching in Broken Hill, I explored the country on the outskirts of town. At the end of a teaching day, I'd head out into the desert, find a track leading off the main road, park the car, and hike into the reddish orange afternoon over quartzite rocks, up slight hills, soothed by the late afternoon light and the sombre green of the low bushes. Sometimes when I had a mass of exam marking to do, I'd pack up the papers and go out to Silverton (where the Mad Max movies were made, and some of Priscilla, Queen of the desert), following trails that led me to views of the Mundi Mundi plains stretching serene to the horizon. When I found a good spot, I'd sit down and mark half a dozen essays before I moved on, amongst yellow flowers, and very occasionally a patch of Sturt's desert pea.

My favourite walking trail in Broken Hill was the Sundown Trail. I met it very early in my five Broken Hill years. Perversely I decided to watch sunrise from the track. However, I arrived two hours before the sun. So I spent an hour or two under the full moon, lolling on the rocky hillside after a clamber up an even rockier creek bed, making comparisons with the ocean I'd left behind. The sounds of the desert were not unlike the sounds of the sea – sussurrent, recurring, soothing. The little patches of cloud were like the patterns made by the sea in the sand. And here was I, 1200 kilometres away from my sons, un-married and oddly free. Then the sun blazed up, and I continued my walk.

I came this way many times over the next few years. I celebrated my fiftieth birthday here with a sunrise picnic. I walked through strong orb-spider webs with an arachnopahobe friend, unaware of the torture I was putting her through. I walked my final ceremonial Broken Hill walk here, leaving behind the treasures I'd brought with me from my coast-home: the lyrebird feather, the dried flowers, the shells.

At weekends, I travelled to Menindee and drove along the sandy track into Kinchega NP on the banks of the Darling. Each week I chose a different camping spot, set up camp and sat idle, watching and listening: an eagle catching a fish; the evening cacophony of galahs; the muddy swirls of the river as it circled fallen trees; the occasional plop and ripples of a fish; the odd car bringing other campers; the sunset glow; the thickening canopy of stars. After a dusk-till-dawn sleep, I'd walk away from camp, through the pink and pale green of hop-bushes along the sandy tracks away from the river gums until it was time to head back to town and lunch at Ruby's. I was never apprehensive on these solitary camping trips except one night when I read in the tent, and created with torchlight a distinction between me and out-there, which peopled out-there with phantom row boats, and giant birds in the river gums over my head.

In the holidays we camped at Mootwingee and walked along a sandy dry riverbed to a homestead dam built at the base of a smooth rock, and then along a ridge, down a rope (not a very long one) through a declivity and back to camp, rock hopping along another very dry riverbed.

One holiday, when my sons weren't available, I drove along the Great Ocean Road and found myself at Mt Eccles (Budj Bim) NP, a surprising treasure in a flat landscape, currently hoping for world heritage listing. I shared my campsite with a mother koala, who whizzed up a tree, baby on back, when I began pitching my tent. The next morning I walked along a lava tube, and then around the small crater lake, long wet grass soaking my trousers. Afterwards, I headed west to the totally different landscape of the Murray-Sunset NP tucked in the corner of Victoria near the South Australian border. There I walked over lake beds and through desert, companioned by emus.

My stint in Broken Hill also took me back walking in the Snowy Mountains in summer, again with work colleagues. This time it was a lot less hardcore: solitary ramblings through the bush and companionable ones in the mountains proper, down a razorback track to the Blue Lake, across trickles of snow, with the constant sound of running water, particular music to my now-desert ears. Stunted snow gums flaunted their beautiful striped bark, and the sun shone – until we headed up the track to Mt Kosciuszko. A cold drizzle began to fall, unexpected despite warnings about sudden weather change. We donned rain capes and rolled pants above our blue knees, feeling colder and colder. At one of the huts, shivering, we decided to turn back. A least we'd come a bit prepared. A straggle of walkers in Tshirts looked pitiful and some with little children were being driven back down by patrolling rangers. I was cold too, but I love it when nature gets the better of humans, and we had our warm cabin and scrabble to retreat to.

 

AS A NEWLY UNESTRANGED WIFE …

When J and I began to spend time together again after ten years apart, we entered the world of rainforests. I was uneasy at first in the dimness of the rainforest zone. The first time J left me so he could explore along the creek, I edged my way quickly back to the security of the sector of light. However this savannah-fear faded with familiarity and I relished dropping over the edge into a likely gulley, him reading the tree-signs from above, and strolling about under the canopy amongst tree ferns and lianas and entangling walking stick vines (my particular nemesis) and trees splotched pink and green and grey with lichen. Occasionally we found treasures: delicate epiphytic orchids or tiny red and blue fungi, almost impossible to photograph in the dim light. My spotted gum walking stick, my hiking boots and my bum were indispensable aids for negotiating this terrain.

We only had two anxious walks, me more than J. West of Bodalla near Hanging Mountain, we left our campsite and walked through the bush to the headwaters of the Deua River. It was flowing, but not too deep, so we decided to walk along it back to camp. Of course it was further than we envisaged, and the afternoon drew on. By then we were walking in the river, the water became colder, and I was hugging myself to stay warm. We were looking for a very steep track to take us back to our starting point. I'm the timid one and I had visions of walking on endlessly into the night past the track. Of course this didn't happen and soon we had the billy boiling and the stars above.

Once we really got lost. “Just a short walk down here” said J, armed with topos, as we descended from the campsite. It was fairly ruinous country at first, leading to logging coupes. Then it became more interesting and we strode happily along an easy flat path, bushflowers blooming beside us. We turned off, and the track became impassable. We turned back, turned off, turned back. In the end, J said definitively, “There's always a track at the top of the ridge”. By this time the sun was sinking, and I was pursued by sunset up a very steep hill through Jilliga ash. I could tell that J was a bit anxious too but I couldn't move fast. I was pretty well belly-crawling as it was. So I moved slowly on into dusk. Eventually we did reach a road on the top of the ridge, and J seemed confident that camp was to the left. The road was easy walking, passing through little gullies of tree ferns, and the moon was full. Soon our kettle was whistling on Dark Helmet, but it was a while before I could look with equanimity at the map and think “Aha! I walked there.”

 

 

Nadgee

The centrepiece of my walking life was a six day, sixty kilometre hike with J into the Nadgee Wilderness, which straddles the border between eastern NSW and Victoria. We prepared for this one for months beforehand, training walks up to ten kilometres at the weekend, and a rigid auditioning of what we'd take with us. We spread everything out on J's floor, and our secondary weekend occupation was an ongoing discussion about what we'd absolutely need, since it was all going on our backs. Water was the big problem. National parks couldn't give us a definite answer about water in the wilderness.

After a disappointing start along a wide dirt road, the delights began: ferny gulleys; high ridges with long views out to sea and mountains; heathland flowering up to our neck; swamps; rivers; lakes, one the most pristine on the east coast; and in the distance, beyond our plans, vast sand dunes. We camped surrounded by wombat burrows near the sea; beside a lake which caught the reflections of the bars of sunset light and the first stars; near a river (full of potable water) which we had to cross naked, carrying packs on our heads, since I wasn't prepared to teeter my way over a log bridge; and finally on high heathland where the drama began.

All night two thunderstorms battled it out, about a metre over our heads, cracking with monumental force. Once I got over the terror it was exhilarating being so close to the elements. Then of course it started to pelt down, and our dry campspot turned to marsh. By morning the water was a few inches deep in the tent, and we were sitting on our soaking rolled-up sleeping bags eating bush bread and the last of our jam. There we cowered, until I said to J “What would you do if I wasn't here?” He said “Pack up and start walking”, and so we did, thirteen kilometres back to the car in pouring rain, with lightning, thunder, hail and high wind thrown in for our greater pleasure. My capacity to thrive on adversity kicked in, and I was high, he not so much. The weight of his pack, a lot heavier than mine, was telling on his knee. When we reached the car we discovered that the creek had risen and was rushing over the ford, so there'd be no escape that night. Nor could we camp because everything was soaking wet. So we settled in the car, a very small sedan. I opened one eye, saw it was light, and groaned, thinking it was still today. In fact it was tomorrow and I'd slept so soundly through the night, without my usual snuffles, snorts and grunts, that J, uncomfortable and wakeful, thought I was dead, and wondered what he'd tell the children. The creek had dropped, so we risked a crossing that nudged the car gently sideways, and headed for food: a very large breakfast that was half-eaten before the plate hit the table.

 

AS A GRANDMOTHER

There's a macabre tradition in the Mt Tamborine family that no holiday is complete without an attempt to kill Nanny Meg. They've tried drowning me (from a kayak in two inches of water) and losing me on a mountain (by sending me off at dusk on a two-hour drop-off-kids drive, halfway to Brisbane and then halfway to the Gold Coast) but the first attempt was the walking one, by heat exhaustion at Tuross Falls, in the hinterland behind my south coast home. It began innocently enough, in a desire to take me somewhere I hadn't been. The day was hot, and the heat increased as we climbed the mountains by the back road, spinning a bit on the hairpin bends and the fine balls of granite. We ate lunch with a few large goannas looking on, and then set off on a track towards the falls. I lagged (this is becoming a theme!) and got hotter and hotter. Soon I'd drained my inadequate water bottle, and walked on feeling more and more lethargic. Finally I lay down on the track, thinking I could go no further, the bush bleached of all its beauty. The only thing that drove me back onto my feet was the thought that the family might go back to the car park by a different route. I staggered on as the temperature settled in the mid 40s. What was supposed to be a pleasant encounter with a waterfall was turning into a nightmare. Finally I reached the lookout where the mob was assembled, to find my granddaughter in melt-down too, because the promised swimming hole was far below, an impossible climb on such a day. I sprawled on the lookout platform and drew breath. Soon however it was time for the heading back ordeal, still without water. I made it to the car-oasis, barely, where I drank two litres and lay comatose in the shade until they had finished frolicking in the cascades. And so the tradition began, with the longest two kilometres I have ever walked.

Grandmother walking doesn't seem to be a safe pastime for me. Many years ago, before he started school, I took my grandson A walking in one of the national parks on Mt Tamborine. We pottered along, talking about this and that and stingers. He was wearing shoes and stamping revenge on stinger leaves, after falling victim to stings when he trod on one barefooted not long before. We walked a bit further, talking some more, and suddenly there was an almighty crack, followed by a crash, as a large tree fell over so close to us that we hugged each other in shock. We hurried on and out of that park as fast as we could.

 

AS A RETIREE

Once I retired walking became a very important part of my days. My beachside home provided me with sand and bush and headland. Most days I'd head off with a book, a water bottle, sometimes lunch, a campchair, my recorder, a camera and tripod, and explore places that should have been familiar to me for years from having lived long in this part of the world. I'd sit in a spectacular place – on the headland amongst the casuarinas looking south to Gulaga: under the twisted spotted gums behind the headland where one day I was startled by a pair of emus; by the lake, glittering in the sun, where I saw a father emu followed by his nine chicks; in a fly-swarming clearing high on a hill where I had a view from behind of familiar coastline – and work on my World War 1 research or reading music with the help of my recorder.

I'd head further afield too, sometimes camping. I walked in Bournda NP, through casuarina tunnels; down rocky stairs with orchids cascading on the cliff above me; across the lagoon once host to a suspension bridge; through eucalypt forest, hakea and kunzea; over a carpet of caladenias, back to the sea, where there were wombat tracks in the sand and a python curled up in a crack in the rocks. I walked the Tathra – Bournda track in two bursts, once from each end, edging along a narrow path amongst coastal banksias. A loud thumping noise stopped me in my tracks. A whale on its annual migration was slapping its tail on the water just below me.

 

 

REFLECTIONS

So many walks. So many pleasure. My memories of walks are sharper than many other memories, maybe because when I'm walking that's all I'm doing. The focus is on my surroundings. Many of my walks have been solitary and exploratory, giving me that lovely feeling of curiosity that drives me on: I wonder what's around the next bend?

I have regrets, so many walks not taken: the Hume and Hovell track in NSW; the Larapinta trail in central Australia; the Bibbulmun track through the tingle and karri forests in the south of Western Australia; the Corn Trail down the Great Divide closer to home; and full moon overnight walks with the bushwalking club into the desert in Broken Hill.

 

For walks all over the world, accompanied by splendid photos, you might like to join Restlessjo and her companions on their Monday walks.

 

 

WARNING

I'm indulging in a frenzy of memoir at the moment. There are five more in draft form, as I tease out important threads of my life. Please don't feel any obligation to join me in this egotistical photo-free journey.

 

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