A Choir of Waves

South West Cape Walk, Part 2

Tim takes in the wild south-west coast at New Harbour 

They say 24 hours is a long time in politics. Which just proves how little bushwalking has in common with “the art of the possible” (as von Bismarck defined politics).

For us 4 hours – the time it took to trudge, wade, grumble, leap and muddle our way from Melaleuca to New Harbour – felt an eternity. With our packs at their heaviest; our feet at their tenderest; the weather at its most recalcitrant; and the daylight waning, it felt like bushwalking had become the art of the impossible.

I’d been trying to play the optimist card all day, reminding the group how beautiful the destination would be. Would there be mud, they’d asked early on? I’d pleaded that it was about 15 years since my last visit here. But yes, I did have memories of “a bit of mud” towards the end of the day’s walk.

As we hit the worst of that “bit of mud”, the promised hail came. Jim was almost gleeful, in an Eeyore kind of way. The rest of us pulled our rainhoods tighter and trudged on.

Memory is a fickle beast. Both precious and daunting memories are subject to the attrition of time. One particular fragment of memory chose to reactivate just as we started to hear the roaring of waves on the shore; just as we’d begun to grin at the nearness of our camp. I confided to Lynne my recollection that there was a scrub band guarding the beach.

“What’s that?” she asked innocently, trying hard to keep both energy and optimism intact. I explained that my vague memory of it was that we had to push through some “jungle” before we’d get to the beach. “And then it’s still a kilometre or so along the beach to our campsite.” I’m not sure I heard Lynne’s response but, bless her, she kept going. And so did everyone else.

At about 7pm we broke through the “jungle” – which actually wasn’t that bad – and stepped out onto New Harbour beach. We were greeted by a bedraggled and grizzled looking group of walkers who had occupied the easterly campsite. “It was more sheltered from the wind here” they told us “although there’s lots more room at the next campsite.” I would have taken this as a territorial hint had I not recalled that the next campsite was far superior to this one.

Lynne arriving at New Harbour as day fades 

We left the group to their dinner, and immediately had to work out how to cross the fast-flowing freshwater lagoon. Both Jim and I still had dry socks: something of a badge on a walk like this. We walked as far seaward as possible, and found the shallowest crossing point. The wet-socked ones were less worried, and soon we were all over and lumbering up the long beach towards home.

And what a home it would prove to be. New Harbour is a vast, wide bay held in the embrace of long, south-trending rocky headlands, all set about with hills variously wooded or buttongrassed. This evening, as must often be the case, wet and fresh winds were conversing loudly with long sets of waves, while oystercatchers, gulls and plovers strutted, flew and trotted along the strand.

Amid all this wildness it was oddly comforting to find a set of wooden steps leading from the beach to our campsite. There, sheltered under a dense stand of native laurel trees, we found plenty of fine tent-sites. We used the last of the day’s energy and light to set up tents and get dinner cooking.

Camping beneath native laurels at New Harbour 

And after that? How blissful was it to be horizontal, dry and warm inside a tent, and to be sung to sleep by a loud choir of waves? Worth the pain is my answer.

Take Off Your Shoes!

God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses! . . . Don’t come any closer! Take off your sandals, because you are standing on holy ground.” – Exodus 3:4-5 (abridged)

Sunrise and moonset over Kunanyi/Mt Wellington 

A friend used to frequent a place called Bastard Hill. When he asked why it was called that, a grizzled local replied “because it’s a bastard of a place”. It’s the kind of sensibility that has lead to place names like Dismal Swamp, Useless Loop, Mount Buggery, Bust-Me-Gall Hill and Stinky Bay.

When it comes to place names, Australians don’t get lyrical. We tend to call a spade a bloody shovel. We’re generally not good at poetics or reverence, tending to shy away from overt exhibitions of emotional connection. The exceptions that prove the rule are places like Uluru and, arguably, the MCG. The former is as close to a universally accepted version of holy ground as Australians are likely to get. The Melbourne Cricket Ground’s “sacredness” is only likely to be recogised by that vociferous minority of Australians comprising most Melburnians and the sports mad.

Off-shore you might add places like Gallipoli and Kokoda, but certainly the list of “sacred sites” is a small one for most non-Aboriginal Australians. I wonder if that reluctance to overtly own our connection to place is a short-coming worth working on. I think back to former Tasmanian Premier Robin Gray’s description of the Franklin River as a “brown leech-ridden ditch”. Surely that bluntness merely disguised a wish to exploit or harm that wilderness river.

In thinking about this in local terms, I realised with a slight shock that I have no name for “our” neighbourhood bush. I walk in it most days, whether for a 10 minutes dog walk; as a “long cut” on my way to work; or simply to get out and breathe, ponder, talk, exercise, pray, listen, explore or photograph. To us its either “the back track” or simply “the bush”. But should it have a proper name?

What might this bird orchid be singing? 

Freeing my inner Eeyore for a moment, I’d be inclined to suggest that there isn’t anything particularly spectacular about it. It’s a mixed forest of peppermint and stringybark eucalypt on steepish, flinty mudstone broken here and there by outcrops of sandstone. Although its understorey of shrubs and ground-covers sometimes approaches prettiness, it has been much put-upon over the years, variously fire-ravaged, over-tracked, eroded and beset by weeds. All in all most would feel it more holey than holy.

But what constitutes “holy”? According to the Talmud, “every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers, 'Grow, grow.'” How mind-boggling is the thought of every living thing attended by a celestial maintenance team? Only marginally more boggling than the sight of the night sky above the bush; or the moon setting over the cloud-blanketed summit of the mountain; or a bird orchid rising in mute worship from this spring’s leaf litter; or a gang of black cockatoos flouncing and squawking their way through the forest.

The night sky over our bush 

Angels aside, the bush holds enough small wonders to still my soul every time I’m open to that. If holy ground is where you can feel insignificant and yet paradoxically connected to that which IS significant, then yes, this bush is holy ground.

Which makes it a place God can “call” to me from. I think it’s time to take off my shoes.


[I would like to acknowledge Barbara Brown Taylor's book "An Altar in the World" for seed ideas as well as the Talmud quote.] 

How Green ... and Gold .. is My Valley

[a Silver Wattle coming into full bloom, South Hobart, Tasmania]

It happens late every August. Yet even after 24 years here, it can still catch me unawares. Content in my Eeyore stoicism towards Hobart’s winter, I am sure that the gloom of winter is still in full control. Then one day I notice the glow: feeble at first, and only on the odd tree. But within a week or two a slow tide of luminous gold begins washing up our valley. It starts close to sea level, and climaxes some weeks later not far below the Organ Pipes on Mt Wellington.

It is the annual blossoming of the silver wattle (Acacia dealbata) a common, quick growing and short lived tree. Although common (and disparaged as unspectacular in Wrigley and Fagg’s Australian Native Plants), silver wattle in spring seems to me a most wonderfully Australian tree. It is as though it has distilled summer’s sunshine, matured it through winter’s long dark nights and short cold days and then, come spring, has flung the sunshine willy-nilly onto every available branch.

Each blossom – and there must be hundreds of thousands per tree – becomes a perfect sphere. But peer more closely and you’ll see that each globed blossom in turn contains globelets. As each of these matures, it unfolds, sending a radial burst outwards, giving each whole blossom the appearance of a Roman candle caught mid-explosion. Each blossom is in micro what the whole tree, indeed the whole landscape, becomes in macro: a slow explosive burst of spring exuberance.

[some silver wattle blossom close-up] 

This botanical gusto extends to the blossom’s perfume. If, at first whiff, an individual blossom has only a faint scent, en masse the scent is altogether less modest. It fills the valley with a thickly sweet, almost dizzying tang. Taken together these sensory bursts make wattle blossom time one of the happiest and surest signs of spring. It is enough to turn any Eeyore into a Tigger.

Vertebrates and invertebrates soon join the party, visiting the blossoms day and night. Moths, butterflies, beetles, bugs, bats, birds and even mammals feast on the distilled sunshine in one form or another. Perhaps they know, happy thoughts notwithstanding, that the flowering of the wattle is far from the end of winter. Without fail there will be more snow before the year is out. Eeyore can’t always be wrong.