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~ Potato Point and beyond

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Tag Archives: Grey Rocks

Weekend strolls

15 Sunday Jul 2018

Posted by morselsandscraps in Bingi Dreaming Track, photos

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

Aboriginal food, Aboriginal medicine, Aboriginal tools, Bingi Bingi, Grey Rocks, Kelly Lake, plants, tracks

Dreaming tracks or Song Lines link places visited by Aboriginal people: the Bingi Dreaming track links campsites, ceremonial and trade sites, fresh water and plentiful coastal food sources. We’re following in the footsteps of the Brinja-Yuin people as we walk the track section by section (it’s 13.5 kilometres one way), returning day after day to enter it at a different point, to cover new territory and to revisit a few favourites: trees, and a pathway or two.

Dreaming Track from Bingi Bingi towards Tuross

Saturday’s stroll begins at Bingi Bingi Point, along a track sloping gently upwards through casuarinas to a bare headland.

I’ve never tackled this stretch before because I thought it would involve beach walking, and I’m pleasantly surprised to find coarse grass underfoot, and a vast view south to Mother Gulaga, who reclines under a blue sky and a warm sun.

We do have to descend to the beach briefly, but a gleaming jut of rocks makes me forget the horrors of deep sand, and I’m more than happy to drag my feet in a triangle to the rocks and then back up across sand to a wooden staircase decorated with lichen.

There the track heads off under a green arch, crosses a flat grassy area where J walks side by side with a magpie, and then enters the familiar banksia forest with its knobbly trunks.

The goal is last week’s tree with the beautiful buds, a eucalyptus as yet unidentified. While J scrutinises it, I spot a half-eaten banksia flower and a couple of tiny mushrooms, and make a study of bladey grass, so different in shade and sun.

J appears with a handful of branchlets from the mystery tree, containing all that’s necessary for ID. We already have photos of the bark.

Back home, he pulls out the plant key and spends two frustrating hours meeting dead ends. Nuts too big. Location wrong. The one tree it looks like in another book doesn’t feature in the key. So the mystery tree is a mystery still.

Dreaming Track: Bingi Bingi to Grey Rocks

On Sunday, after a breakfast of bream and rye toast, we amble along the section of the track that skirts Kelly’s Lake.

It passes through an an Indigenous pharmacy, grocery and hardware store, beautifully signposted with illustrations by various Aboriginal women, who are also sources for knowledge about the uses of native plants.

And there are many. If you suffer from rheumatism or arthritis, or have a swelling, you can harvest a bunch of native nettles (Urtica incisa) and beat the affected area. If you fancy chewing something or want to make yourself, say, a digging stick, the she-oak (Casuarina glauca) will provide green seeds or timber.

If you need a shot of vitamin C, chew the red berries of the saltbush (Rhagodia candolleana), available in summer only. If you’re after something more substantial, seek out the tubers of the silkpod vine (Parsonsia straminea).

If you have a sweet tooth the banksia flower (Banksia integrifolia) has rich nectar you can steep in water for a satisfying drink.

If you want to weave a mat, make string, cook something on hot coals or make damper, mat rush (Lomandra longifolia) is what you need.

if you can’t find Lomandra, saw-edge grass (Ghania sp) will serve much the same purposes.

If you’re bitten by a snake, looking for a fruit snack or need a handle for your axe, native cherry (Exocarpos cupressiformis) will provide.

If you want to munch on a plump pink or purple fruit (the ones in the photo have yet to ripen) head for groves of lilli pillis (Syzygium smithii) in the remnant rainforest, and stop to admire their spectacular bark.

The track crosses the mouth of the lakeand via a wide sandbar, and takes us past an island of black rock plonked at the tideline, to the shapely piles of rock at Gray Rocks, lichened by orange, and spotted with black xenoliths.

We eat lunch – sweet and sour rice and a beer – in a restaurant at the edge of the land, looking out over rolling blue to the horizon, and along the coast towards Mullimburra, our seat folds of grey granite.

We return to the car along a track through dense green, down wooden stairs covered in sand and pigface and along the beach, now hard enough for comfortable walking.

Weekend pleasures

23 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by morselsandscraps in Eurobodalla beaches, photos

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Grey Rocks, Kelly’s Lake, rock gardens, rock patterns, skyping Warsaw

But first a riff on memory, or in this case its non-existence. We begin our Saturday explore at Gray Rocks, and head north along Bingi Beach to an area of castellations, dykes and honeycombed rocks. As I fade into afternoon sleep, I compose a post in my head. Before I write it, I search my blog to see whether I’ve featured this Eurobodalla beach before. Sure enough, there it is, dated 2015, and the words are pretty much the ones I’d shaped as I dozed off. Suddenly I feel some sympathy for our aging Australian history lecturer who gave us the same lecture three days in a row back in the 1960s.

I revamp my post into an extended list of pleasures.

Rock patterns

There’s no escape from these and little chance of exact repetition, since the supply is inexhaustible. Even when the patterns are of the same genre, say a creamy-apricot meander of veins, the particular example is guaranteed to be different.




Rock gardens

This segment is for Gilly who admired rock gardens in a previous post.

Grey Rocks granite provides an endless supply of nooks and crannies where plants take root, sometimes grasses and pigface endemic to the coast, and sometimes runaways from gardens.

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Amongst tonalite and xenoliths

While J scrutinises the rocks on the waterline, marked as tonalite by the presence of darker grey foreign rock enveloped when magma ruled, I move around for the sheer joy of stepping from rock to rock: across gaps, up and down, rarely these days needing to use my well-practised tactic of bumming it.

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Lake walk

Sometimes the best plans are those that appear when you overturn other plans. A quick look at the south side of Grey Rocks becomes absorbing, and then we’re drawn to a rocky outcrop further south, and then we’re close to Kelly’s Lake and the Dreaming Track that follows it as it winds parallel to the beach. So why not go there instead of back to the castellations on the north end of the beach? Past curvaceous tidelines and reflections and sand gardens, onto a mossy track through casuarinas and old banksias and thick flowering vines, past lichen logs and bright orange fungi deployed along a fissured branch, noting a perfect assemblage of leaf, twigs and casuarina nut, following the trail of the posse of horses we’d seen earlier on the beach.


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Skyping Warsaw 

Now the days are getting longer, we decide to leave the bush at skyping time and take Warsaw to the beach. It’s a short yarn this evening because my daughter’s hungry. Maja wants to show us their chosen birthday cake – they’re 5 in a month – not only the rocket ships they have chosen, but every other cake in the Australian Women’s Weekly book of birthday cakes. I watch awed as she holds up the book and makes sure we can see, a skill I never mastered in kindergarten classrooms. She begins to take her undies off and mother remonstrates. But she doesn’t want to display a bare bottom. She wants to show us the rockets ships and planets that decorate them.

There’s been a change in twin dynamics: Jas used to be twin to the fore, but he’s in the background tonight. After 15 minutes, we begin to sign off, walking along the beach in a strange procession, J in the lead with the iPad facing the ocean, me stumbling along behind carrying two folding chairs, a spare iPad, and discarded jumpers and hats.

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