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Tag Archives: friends

Durras

04 Wednesday Jul 2018

Posted by morselsandscraps in beaches, photos

≈ 29 Comments

Tags

Durras Beach, friends, rock platform, sandstone

For Marie, with thanks for five glorious hours, and years of friendship

I sit in the sun with my friend Marie on her wide deck, looking down over neat paddocks to a line of trees and the creek, as she tells me about the creatures that share her world. A tawny frogmouth regularly perches on the deck railings. Barn owls live in the shed. One year a pair of cranes built a practice nest in a tall eucalypt: the next year they returned “for real” and she watched three chicks as they learnt how to stagger along a branch towards food brought by their parents. When a plover family began to behave strangely she took notice and the parents led her to a post hole where one of the chicks had fallen in. Her partner encountered two kookaburras fighting: when he picked them up he found the beak of one firmly embedded in the other one’s head. An old kangaroo who hangs around the house recently died: his body is down by the creek.

As we talk the horse snorts periodically.

I love visiting Marie. She always has travel stories: this time about her escape from a dictatorial tour guide on a package tour in Cambodia. She eyes off the drivers waiting to waylay tourists; finds one who isn’t aggressive; and books him for the next day to take her by tuk tuk out to the killing fields.

We talk and soak up the sun, and then head out for a walk, driving through the forests of Murramarang National Park, to Durras Beach, where the bush comes down the mountain to the sea. The tide is lowish but coming in, and a flat rock platform stretches out towards a little parcel of an island topped by green. This is sandstone country: we don’t have flat platforms like this further south. We follow a thin track edging the beach until we encounter a kangaroo who seems to be blind and sick. When its companion emerges from the bush we decide to leave the track to them and I bum it down to the sand.

Soon we’re caught up in all the visual delights of the platform: the shiny gleam of rocks; pools catching bits of the sky; rocks neatly packaged in iron-stone; unnaturally natural right angles; neat layers of rock laid down under the sea over who knows how many eons; pock marks, cracks and intrusions; tiny shells, a dead starfish, a wrenched up crinoid and piles of seaweed; swirls of brown and grey and orange and tan; and then the grand finale.

The view down the coast along a string of bulbous bluffs, striped and capped with trees: pleasures for another day when the tide is low.

,

Eurobodalla beaches: Wallaga Beach

16 Friday Jun 2017

Posted by morselsandscraps in Eurobodalla beaches, photos

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Catching up with friends

14 Friday Apr 2017

Posted by morselsandscraps in brief biographies, photos

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

friends, reclaiming home

email is a fine, as far as it goes, but it’s not a patch on face to face meetings. Part of grounding myself back here is spending time with my amazing community of friends.

I visit Elizabeth in her shop, Holey Glass Beadery and Jewellery Gallery, in Cobargo. We sit on the deck out the back with her three-legged dog, chatting and avoiding raindrops. I’ve known her since the early days of my life on the south coast when she was living rough with three small children in the bush a long way from town. Right now she’s in the early stages of cultivating dreadlocks, and planning a trip to China and Mongolia. She is the queen of enterprise: over the years, she’s sold secondhand goods, natural foods, paper, and now beads, both in the Cobargo shop and in showcases online. She’s also been a reading recovery teacher, a special needs teacher, a traveller, and a music teacher, all these things with her whole heart.

Christina is at home, in her flat near the ocean. I meet her new puppy, Clancy, soft-furred and licky-nippy, bought with the proceeds of a poker machine win, and reluctant to sit still enough for an unblurry portrait. I’ve known her even longer than I’ve known Elizabeth. She plays guitar and recorder – she taught me for a while; has been a potter; and is studying music long distance. She’s a superlative letter writer, and I curse email that has deprived me of her pages of entertaining scrawl. She tells me it’s her father’s birthday tomorrow. He’ll be 93 and he’s still working as an earth mover. Our conversation ranges over books, grandchildren, art, the difficulties of learning a new piece of music, the vagaries of men and mothers, while Clancy, bright-eyed, takes in every word.

Meg is a somewhat newer friend, if you can call 25 years new.  She fairly recently retired to Bingie just up the coast from me, after a life as environmental activist, heritage manager, and consultant to Aboriginal communities planning businesses. She tells me about the building of a bread oven called Esmeralda, and her venture into the world of YouTube to document its construction; her extensive family, children, stepchildren and both kinds of grandchildren; and plans for a trip to New Zealand, walking, kayaking (maybe), and visiting step-family. She is very patient as I gabble my Warsaw year, released into my own language, and asks me a hard question: “How did your year in Warsaw change you?” I’m still thinking about that one. We meet at a new Bodalla cafe called Downward Dog, which doubles as an art gallery and a venue for yoga, a knitting circle and eventually dog days, with training in cafe etiquette for dogs.

 

Kate is an even newer friend. We met at a book club (now defunct) and have bonded deeply over books, art, being outside and juggling two homes – her 95 year-old mother lives in England. We breakfast at the Quarterdeck in Narooma, packed on Sunday morning, sharing our lives back in Australia and making plans for low key walking and camping adventures, before heading off to the movies. Kate visited me in Warsaw and often sends me links, always to things I really enjoy. I am inspired by her thoughtful approach to everything, her ability to pull herself up short to consider what she’s about to say, and her focused determination to understand more than the media feeds us, currently about Islam.

I don’t usually enjoy seeing more than one friend at a time but Charis and Meg are different: we form a great coven. Charis has just returned from Georgia via Paris and was vivid about the delights of patisseries and galleries in Paris and renovating her daughter’s Canberra house; and reticent about her other daughter’s contact with refugees in detention, because that’s what our wretched government requires (reticence, definitely not contact). Over the years I have known her she has been a horticulturist, the owner of a gallery and coffee shop, a weaver and eccentric craftswoman, a conservator at the National Gallery of Australia, a volunteer with a Bali business documenting the stories behind traditional images on textiles, and always a superlative hostess.

Meg is excited about a rare visit from her daughter and two grandchildren; an ABC program about single women; a series by Brian Cox on stargazing; walking in New Zealand; preserving and pickling, and cooking bread. We meet at the Dairy Shed in Bodalla, and sit on a deck overlooking a very green valley and a full dam. One of the tables would have repaid at least five minutes of photography. 

I’m lucky to carve myself an hour out of Sandy’s busy schedule. She spends a lot of time in Sydney and Canberra, and I find she has just been to Brunei Island for a weekend workshop. I grill her about her climate lobbying with a variety of our federal politicians and their advisers, fascinated by the idea of building relationships and making personal connection as the basis for persuasion. She also finds time to sing in a choir and go to a dance group. In her working life she developed a program for bringing kids and blokes together which is till being used in Sydney communities; and organised art classes where refugee women told their stories in paintings. We chat on a bench by the Moruya River waiting for the 3 o’clock bell that announces the start of the growers’ market.

My catch-up with Sarah, my longest-standing south coast friend, begins at Coila Lake at daybreak. We walk along its edge as the sun rims the horizon cloud and talk photography; trust or otherwise in various forms of medical intervention; mutual acquaintances from the past; how she came to be living here; her work with special needs students who might be shy face to face, but who star in school musicals. The refrain is “aren’t we lucky to live in such a wonderful place?” We return to her house for coffee and avocado toast, and I’m reminded again of her capacity to create a gracious restful home. Her children are more scattered than mine – one in Sydney, the other two in Panama and Hawaii.

Marie was the office manager when I was a consultant. We bonded over our delight in solitary adventures. We meet for lunch in Batemans Bay, a hefty chicken schnitzel heralded by one of those alarms that sound off on your table, accompanied by hefty talk: ten days with her grandchildren in northern NSW; a group tour through Vietnam and Cambodia where she raised eyebrows going off on her own; a three-day cruise which convinced her never again; the excitement of approaching the retirement she and her partner have been working towards when they turn 50; her work for the Lyme disease community; and the support of friends around the death of a parent. Afterwards we walk along the edge of the Bay towards the opening to the sea, underneath a huge flock of screeching corellas, still talking nineteen to the dozen.

Finally, I connect with Sharon, always the most difficult to catch because she is still working, not quite full time but in a job that has a knack of arranging necessary meetings on her day off. We sit outside in a slight chill at Blue Earth, where the gardens are flourishing, the chooks cluck, the mulch around the veggie patch is deep, and my poached egg looks like meringue. We talk about our children and their dilemmas, our grandchildren, the world of health work in an environment of savage cuts, people highly qualified in their own field having to do secretarial work that someone qualifies in that field could do much more efficiently, and cheaply. We talk about decisions and the difficulty of making them, especially when one thing leads to another. As we part we set a date for our next breakfast together in two weeks time – job permitting.


 

These are my south coast friends, women who take me through doorways into many different worlds. I always leave them with unfinished conversations waiting for next time, feeling enriched in so many directions by their friendship. 

PS Time with my oldest friend is pending, a week together in Melbourne in May. En route I will also spend precious time with my sister(in law) and another friend.

A daybreak walk by Coila Lake

31 Friday Mar 2017

Posted by morselsandscraps in lake walk, photos

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Coila Lake, dogs, early morning, friends

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Nothing like a friend of more than thirty years to coax me out at daybreak. I drive cautiously along the Potato Point road in the pre-dawn light to avoid macropods, and meet Sarah beside the lake, near the boatshed that used to be her home and is now an Airbnb rental. She’s waiting for me with her dog Penny (you can play “spot the dog” if you like) in an unexpected chill that requires jacket and scarf.

We walk across the grass to the squelchy sand interlaced with dried sea grass that runs along the side of the lake. Everything is encrusted with barnacles, pink in the early light. The water suddenly breaks windripple into splash, as a school of fish leap and fall. The rising sun blazes along the edge of the bank of cloud and sends elegant thin shadows across the sand. Soon the early light catches the trees and makes it clear why early morning is called the golden hour.

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