Once was a bridge

Tags

destruction, memories, Tyrone Bridge

There you are, a low wooden bridge spanning the Tuross River at Eurobodalla, taking traffic over the mountain to Nerrigundah. You’ve done it for years. You were an old hand when we arrived in your neighbourhood in 1977.

Photo credit: Annette Gray

You provided a basic kind of music, rattling away as trucks and cars slowed down to cross you. You were a primitive and functional work of art, worn wooden planks with gaps between them; bolts and replacement bolts; a thin swathe of sand and a slither of casuarina needles at the edges.

Photo credit for images used in two collages: Annette Gray

Your low parapet looked down onto the river, sluggish sometimes, other times whirling with flood waters. Many times you were completely submerged, but it didn’t seem to bother you. You surfaced in all your sturdiness ready to continue the job you were built for.

You wove your way into our lives. We used you to gauge the height of floodwaters. We walked across you to reach the sandy beach on the other side. The boys rode bikes clunkety clunkety clunk across your uneven boards, chucking wheelies for your whole length and triumphant if the gaps didn’t upend them. One day, I sat, motor revving at the town end of you debating what use I’d make of childless freedom when the kids were with their father: Bodalla pub? Or sitting around languorously in my black lingerie at home?

Once the army was using you and the area around you for training exercises. My son wanted to know what was going on. “They’re trying to take the bridge”, I said. He was mystified. “Take it where?”

Thirty-five years later you have indeed been taken, by the council, not the army. There you are, neatly sliced and laid out in piles in the reserve beside the river.

You’ve been replaced by a sprightly concrete bridge, much higher than you were. It will never have your charm. It will never grunt continuo to accompany our swims or Saturday night wine on the river bank. It won’t wear attractively into wooden scars. It won’t respond to our feet with splinters and clatter. There is no way we’ll be walking along its parapet, looking down on schools of tiny fish or sand ripples under slightly tea coloured water.

Photo credit: J

And you? What’s in your future? You’ll be used for transplants and spare parts, to extend the lives of other old wooden bridges in the shire.

You leave us behind to mourn you.

Aragannu

Tags

Aragannu, memories, midden, shipwreck, trees

I often walk beside my past as I move around my part of the world. I drive down the dusty ribbed road through the bush to Aragannu in Mimosa Rocks National Park and memories swarm. Here, I saw my first grove of blueberry ash. Here, we were once the rowdiest campers, behaving as we’d hate anyone else to behave. Here I sat by a campfire with a friend who had just lost her son. Here I stumbled along a faint track in search of rainforest, under a prostrate figtree and past modern middens. Memories expand at the rocky beach and I remember my aunt spraining her ankle on such a beach when she was my age.

Things have changed since my last visit, quite a while ago now. There’s a well marked track and even a boardwalk. Join me as I walk in the momentary present. Next time I go there this visit too will be part of my memory.

Let’s park the car in one of the many empty parking bays, under entwined trunks and twisting branches.

The ramp leading up to the loo offers many vantage places for capturing rocks in symbiosis with trees …

… and more twisting branches

Then it’s time to head off along a leaf-surfaced and root obstructed track, past more contorted trees.

Occasionally, a tree stands straight and tall …

… but more often they have a lean on them.

The track turns and begins to climb, up rocksteps and over ankle-turning loose rocks, over a ridge and down to a camping area (only one tent). The track continues on and becomes a boardwalk leading out to the sea and passing a mound, grass growing over an Aboriginal shell-midden.

The beaches and coves are rocky – large round rocks or ovaloid rocks or curved-corner rectangular rocks …

… becoming larger as you head further north …

… where land artists have made good use of material at hand.

In the background are Mimosa Rocks, so named because PS Mimosa was wrecked on them in 1863 with the loss of two lives. The wreck is still there, protected from marauders by the 1976 Commonwealth Historic Shiprecks Act.

The river road 6: creek and clouds

Tags

flowers, memories

Saturday’s walk was busy. Four cars, and two stopped to ask for information. “Are you local?” seems like a simple question. I’ve been around here for more than forty years. It never is: I didn’t have the required information.

But I did have another distinctive patch of road. It wound past a house, down to a bridge across a creek with quite a bit of water: there I encountered the ghost of my daughter as a tiny girl (she’s now past forty). I don’t remember the details of her connection with the bridge, but there must be one because I always think of her when I cross it.

The day was hot. I remembered sunscreen and forgot insect repellant so I was buzzed by flies under a dense-clouded sky, and worked up quite a respectable sweat. The bellow of a bull, and the whiplash cry of the whipbird. Mint bushes flourishing beside the road. On the inhospitable-seeming rock of a cutting the purple of two species of fairy fans; the pink of the butterfly shaped flower on the trigger plant; the white of two different kinds of grass-flower; the creamy green of Bilhardieria. Elsewhere the pale yellow balls of black wattle, and the brighter yellow of two tiny flowers. Flowering vines filled the air with a heavy perfume, and amongst the grass were two minuscule old friends, pimpernel and scour weed.

Reedy Creek Bridge

From Reedy Creek Bridge

Grass against sky

Mint bush – Prostanthera nivea(?)

Maybe Marsdenia rostrata

Purple fan flower: Scaevola ramosissima?

Purple fan flower: Scaevola ramosissima?

Trigger plant: Stylidium graminifolium

No idea!

Hairy mitrewort: Mitracasme …

Appleberry: Billardiera scandens

Taprooted oxalis: Oxalis radicosa (?)

Black wattle?

Scour weed and pimpernels

Road through wattles to clouds

Turning point

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Eurobodalla beaches: Jemison’s

Tags

Jemison's, memories

Jemison’s is the closest beach to my home. It has absorbed many images from my past.

My two sons, their father and their mates stand at the top of the grassy track, beanies pulled down, hands in pockets, grunting their evaluation of the day’s surf. My niece holds her baby in the water as he experiences the sea for the first time in a shallow sandy rock-pool. My Most Beloved Senior Granddaughter dances and twirls and cartwheels along the beach, desperate to climb the cliffs at beach end. My son tells me with reverence that he was the first to surf a new beach formed by heavy seas near the southern headland. My artist friend scrutinises the rocks and opens my eyes to their patterns and colours as she collects inspiration for her painting. I face the dilemma of two small children, one of whom wants to fling herself in the water and swim to New Zealand, while the other one, terrified of the surf, heads frantically for the dunes. I drive the 1300 kms from Broken Hill, eager to see my two sons who live with their father, rush too fast down the grassy track and crash head over heels amongst the dune wattle. I walk along the beach at night after a meal of champagne and fish and chips with my husband and hear the resonance of the waves and the counterpointing squeak of the sand.

South end, looking north to the village

North end, looking south to the headland

There are three ways to reach Jemison’s Beach. A track winds behind the dunes, between casuarinas and zeiria and monotoca and eucalypts and banksias, and emerges where a creek reflects the twisted trunks of casuarinas at the southern end.

A sandy path held in place by boards, and edged by dune wattle and a protective fence, takes you to the centre of the beach.

A steep grassy track topples you towards the north, where daisies and nasturtiums overflow from headland gardens and coastal rosemary, dune wattle and and white correa thrive. On the headland above is the village of Potato Point.

My memories go back close to forty years. And yet when I walked the beach the other day for a photo-shoot I saw things I have never seen before: the jagged honeycombing; the lichen patterns; the steepness of the cliffs against the blue sky: the rocky outcrops stretching towards the waves; and the wonderful colour and design of the rock face (featured in Jemison’s part 2)

Sometimes, in rough weather, there are sand cliffs taller than me. Sometimes, tongues of ocean reach to the creek and deposit sea-weed where there’s usually a protective sandbank. Sometimes the shoreline is littered with bluebottles, shearwater skeletons and grey pumice.

Sometimes what I capture at the beach is evanescent, fugitive: the particular patterns on the rock face, brought into definition by moisture or light, or revealed as sand retreats; treasures left behind by the sea; visitors, human or animal, or traces of such visitors; flowers and grasses changing with the changing seasons.

At the end southern end of the beach, steps lead up to the headland. Walk across it – above rocky coves and a tiny beach reached by a rough track too steep for me; underneath the flight path of sea eagles; looking across to the majesty of Gulaga – and you reach the next beach.

Another Jemison’s post at

http://morselsandscraps.wordpress.com/category/south-jemisons-beach/

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