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Tag Archives: sandstone

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: Wasp Head

25 Friday Dec 2015

Posted by morselsandscraps in Eurobodalla beaches, geology, photos

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

dropstone, fossils, sandstone, Wasp Head

Wasp Head is a beach unlike any other I’ve ever seen. At 280 million years old, it has all the apricot blush, lure and comeliness of geological youth. The landscape here is the result of sedimentation and the movement of glaciers and there isn’t only spectacular sandstone but shell fossils, ironstone box work, dropstones, and even, somewhere, fossil logs.

We begin our exploration admiring the colours and shapes of a sandstone cliff-face. Then we amble around honeycombed rocks until our way is stopped by the sea. At this point we do our usual find-a-path: a scramble up a slope slippery with casuarina needles and dry leaves, a stroll through a casuarina forest and a descent down a grassy hill to an expansive rock platform.

The rock platform is honeycombed, flat with the occasional standing rock. On one of these J spots a shell fossil, and the search is on. It wasn’t the only one.

There are also dropstones carried along and then discarded by glaciers, gravel flows embedded in rock, and strange holes for which I have no explanation.

As we move around the levels of the rock platform we look across to the island over a group of surfers, busy catching waves and breaking boards.

After a late picnic breakfast – potatoes, bread, hummus and leaf litter picked in a hurry from J’s garden (“We’ll just brush the dirt off!”), we head down the path to another platform, this time sloping in sandstone curves to the vivid sea. Here are patterns and curlicues; intricate ironstone boxes; and maybe even a leaf fossil.

The tide covers the beach below cutting us off from further adventures, so we head home, already planning to return to this astonishing landscape.

Maybe Jo’s Monday walkers would enjoy this taste of the NSW south coast.

Posted with BlogsyPosted with Blogsy

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