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~ Potato Point and beyond

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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.

Hotchpotch 14

19 Monday Feb 2018

Posted by morselsandscraps in hotchpotch, photos

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

architecture, beach, family, plants

Family holiday

For a month in December and January my house was full of family. I failed them a few times. Failure to provide surf was my main crime – “the worst surf over Christmas in 20 years, mum.” Failure to have in the fridge whatever it was whoever it was was looking for ran it a close second. In spite of this, they took me to Canberra where we visited the Dombrovskis‘ photographic exhibition and Questacon, the national science and technology centre; and they harvested oysters from the rocks, enough for a quick pre-dinner feast for six.

Oh, and I almost forgot! How could I? Two most important participants in a family get-together: Cruz and Jenga.

On the beach

Most of my beach-walking was close to home, but there were still plenty of treasures of the usual kind: seaweed, driftwood, shells, rockface, grasses. There was also an unaccustomed pleasure: company.

Prowling daybreak

I maintained my early mini-walks, occasionally before the household was stirring, although it was hard to beat hopeful surf-seekers. The early morning light remained a great treat, especially as it fell on the seedpods of Stars of Bethlehem. The vanishing of their blue and white flowers marked the end of Christmas.

Houses around Spud

I took advantage of the slumbers of the village to do a quick photo-essay on Potato Point architecture, beginning with my own beforested house. (By the time the visitors left it was a bit less forested. When a hakea fell over the drive it left an emptiness that drew attention to other leaners and potential fallers, which my children removed while I hid my face and hoped for their safety.) The other houses are mostly undistinguished, although there aren’t many traces of the beach shacks which have either been removed or renovated. What strikes me most looking through this collection is the bareness, which may be because a lot of the houses are holiday places.

Leaning

Sometimes photographic themes leap out at you. For a while everywhere I looked things were leaning, and I foresaw a lengthy photo essay. Then things stopped leaning, and this is the grand total.

And if all this summer is too much for you … twins in Warsaw

Two artists from different worlds

09 Friday Feb 2018

Posted by morselsandscraps in art, museums, photos

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Arnhem Land, “Midawarr”, John Wolseley, Merrklyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Mulkun Wirrpanda, National Museum of Australia, plants

Bukmak dhuwal mala ngatha ga borum nganapurrung manikaymirr ga marryun nganapurr ngunhiwal wängalil

(And every plant, every food: we sing it, we dance it.)

Midawarr (Harvest) is an exhibition of paintings done over ten years in harvest season, as Mulkun Wirrpanda and John Wolseley meet to collect, eat and paint the edible plants of Yolgnu country in Arnhem Land on the north coast of Australia. It’s richly diverse country: salt water, open forest, woodland, flood plains, freshwater wetlands, monsoonal vine forests and trees fringing river systems. Mulkun, an expert in Yolgnu cultural and botanical knowledge, paints mainly on bark, using gangul (yellow ochre), gurrngan (manganese, a black pigment), meku (red ochre), and gapan (white clay pigment) ground on a gunda (grinding block); and John, a renowned landscape artist depicts the same plants on a vast scroll.

Mulkun says she had to find a new way to paint beyond the sacred identity of plants, and find their secular identity. “The way they grow, the way they look and express themselves. This gave me their rhythm or their pattern.” For her, the paintings hold knowledge that it’s important to pass on to her people. John’s dilemma is different: he has to find a way for a painter of another culture to “make a work about a site of great power and sacred importance, and do so with reticence and reverence. I have painted the land at one remove, as seen through a veil.”

Along the sinuous panel beneath the paintings there is information about the plant, its use as food and medicine, and also an image of the same plant taken from John’s painting.

This is Gunga, the spring pandanus, used as a painkiller for teeth. “When little kids lose their teeth we chuck them into the tree so their new teeth come back sharp and strong.”

Butjuwutju / Mona (bush potato) has a tuber like a spinning top, but its grass-like stems are hard to see amongst other grass. People no longer know about this food. It’s been replaced by flour.

Nyathu (cycad) is probably the oldest food plant in the world, and sacred bread for the Yolngu. The nut is poisonous and has to be carefully processed. Community leader, Merrklyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, says that two Yolgnu clans still use this as an analogy for good governance: if proper processes aren’t used to make decisions, the outcome is poisonous and people will be killed.

John’s vast scroll is sort-of captured in a slide show where each frame duplicates a bit of the preceding one, and in a collage of close-ups.

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A short video shows the two artists at work, searching for plants and painting them, as John learns their Yolngu names.

I can’t leave this post without telling Mulkun‘s story. Her mother was taken by a policeman when she was out collecting räkay (water chestnuts) with other women, her child perched on her shoulders. Her father speared and killed the policemen and he never returned. Such is Australia’s shameful history.

Hotchpotch 3

18 Tuesday Apr 2017

Posted by morselsandscraps in photos

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

fruit, plants, sea, trunks

Spotted gum, casuarina, paperbark

For sale at Blue Earth Cafe


Chevron (?), puffer fish, seaweed


Oregano, puffball, beach flowers, bronze leaf, beach grass


Dreadlocks under cultivation

Narooma community centre artwork, town sign


In a National Geographic in the doctor’s waiting room

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