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.
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.
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.
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.
