Friday, July 14, 2023

Nostalgia as antidote

 

 

The Perversi and Ongarello clans. Mid 1960s

A who’s who of trouble. Can you spot me?

 

According to the World Health Organisation, those above 65 are considered elderly.  As an elder therefore, I have time on my hands, lots of it, time to indulge in romanticising the past. Cosseting the past couldn’t be described as a trustworthy pursuit, that would be a fantasy.  It’s more a constructed way-it-used-to-be partial unreliable memory, partial imaginary feel-good narrative. I guess it doesn’t require truth. Just rose-coloured glasses! It’s claimed one’s pain perception is lowered through indulging in nostalgia.

 

Today, nostalgia is not so much defined as lived. It has become an antidote to technology, a literal raison d’etre.  Particularly, in this instance, for the elderly.

 

It’s not that I long for the good old days.  Neither do I wish to idealise it; it was different, hard. We were less evolved. Perhaps naïve.  We smoked lots of ‘safe’ cigarettes, drove while pissed, suffered the patriarchy, were oblivious to trauma conditions, the scorching sun, and chemicals and sprays.  Climate change and the ozone layer were conditions that existed in the ether, or not at all.   We even managed to overlook creepy Rolf Harris.

 

I remember the past as somewhat more simplified. We weren’t distracted or consumed by technology, artificial intelligence, scam calls, hackers, stranger danger. We went bush, or drank to forget.  We hadn’t yet been introduced to the production of synthetic embryos, deep fakes and killer drones. We had lots of sex. Well, some people did.  To be fair, I didn’t spend much time reading newspapers.  I was too busy making stuff, partying, working, house renovating and parenting. Not necessarily in that order.

 

Back then we didn’t slam our fist on the fuck-you litigious button to extract financial revenge when someone did us wrong.  We took responsibility, or got angry.  I recently admitted to my acupuncturist I was tormented by it.  His response: ‘still?’ I felt a stab of shame. Only a man would say that to a woman! It remains unfashionable amongst the patriarchy for women to display anger.  Anger energises, sharpens the mind, allows you to let off steam, and gives creativity a boost. It can also make you sick.

 

Largely, as someone inclined toward intensity and sorrow, emotions that share space with a hot temper - go figure - remembering more simple times and the calming feeling of nostalgia, is medicine. Fabrication, or not. Having had my joy factor and pleasure principle overlooked as a small child, nostalgia provides me with enough juju to maintain a sense of personal order, to put on a happy face. I’m drawn to serious people and serious conversation. My tribe. I lay the entire blame for this on my astrological natal chart: Scorpio by four! Due to this, I need more Hare Krishna devotees to cross my path, minus the covert misogyny naturally.  Wearing cheerful, colourful saris, and banging cymbals, a kind of whoop whoop abandon written over their faces, I’m often transfixed by their sight, their real or imaginary inner hosanna.  The sight of their slow procession and their noisy clangers is an event sure to raise my dopamine levels, charm a smile into existence.

 

But seriously, (sorry, not sorry), give me a hit of wistful yearning for the past any day, a sentimentality washed in indistinct sepia tones. Give me just a moment’s return to too-heavy make-up, mini-skirts and fuck-me boots. Disco balls, barrels of riesling, outrageous wedges and stilettos, and Farrah Fawcett hair. Give me hot days in the garden with annoying sisters by four and the even more annoying cousins, mostly boys.  The power of our collective energy, the vibrational delight of singing together, the innocence, the mischief-making and collecting dandelion flowers from the side of the road, destined for neighbourly mothers in exchange for sweets.  Trips to the mountains, backpacking through South East Asia, drive-in cinemas and the crimson Valiant.  Green ginger wine, the smell of jonquils and pine trees, the rolling hills of Diamond Creek, and the winding Yarra River.  The melancholic baritone of Leonard Cohen, his poetry and music.  I don’t want to go back to it all, but the charisma of remembering invokes a feeling of belonging, somehow more real, more wholesome.

 

There’s no substitute for reminiscence, especially an account that excludes trauma. There is no stand-in for the meeting of eyes, the touch of a tender hand on your arm.  I identify with the philosopher Simone Weil when she says ‘attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity’. It can’t be replicated with a device. Paying attention to each other, and the feeling of homesickness is a remedy for a world obsessed with smart phones and gadgets.

 

You can’t stop change.  I wouldn’t want to; I actually thrive on it. This medium-level ache for yesteryear could be a desire to escape, preparation for death, or just a natural pastime that aids examining regret and remorse in order to make amends with the past before it’s too late.  It’s a good thing, right?

 

Wednesday, May 17, 2023

Be like the tree

 






 

A Welcome to Warburton sign on the outskirts of town it is not. For more than one reason. Firstly, the forest is a big drawcard, one of the chief reasons I’m here. Secondly, the words ‘forest’ and ‘closed’ in the same sentence? I’m sorry, they simply don’t belong together.  Myer closes, so do servos, sometimes. Forests don’t! Or shouldn’t. I’m not going for a coffee or a three-pack of new socks. I’m here to hike, in nature.

 

I’ve escaped the city for a week’s R & R.  I can already feel my muscles soften. The ground is a carpet of red, gold and orange autumn leaves. The green contours of the land evoke the topography of the Northern Rivers, the earthy smell of decay a familiar reminder. The babbling Yarra River, meandering, rewards my frayed senses, confers the gentle pause my body longs for.   

 

But this forest closed business can’t be for real. When I check out Mrs Google, I see the bridge over the Yarra River leading to the forest is under reconstruction.  It’s the only vehicular access to the forest.  Wading through the river is an option, but I’d have to have my head read.   I must find a way to the forest. The images of the towering redwoods on the web lend strength and immediacy to the lure in my bones. I recognise this urgent, bracing call, this unambiguous audacity I’m certain I’ve carried for lifetimes.

 

I’ve heard there’s a path high in the mountains.  It’s an old maintenance track built to support an aqueduct that in 1911 was constructed to supply water to the greater City of Melbourne.  Today it’s a hiking trail, a 32 km return trip that takes you close to the forest. I’ll pedal.  

 

Mr Bike Man is patient, and not bad on the eye. Reciting the 5000-word Operation Manual and Book of Expected Behaviour for Novice E-Bike Riders, he stops occasionally to establish my comprehension; I nod, thinly.  Inside, my anxiety reaches new heights.  He then proceeds to show me the route on a very small map – gates to negotiate, steep slippery inclines that require me to walk the bike, crossings of main roads, forks on the path.  I’ve absorbed about 10% of the whole delivery. I come within an eyelash of quitting.  

 

The reward is the route. It traverses great stands of mountain ash and walls of tree ferns. Yellow-tailed black cockatoos wail and sweep across the path ahead of me.  The glorious sun is out, and my wobbly arms are getting furiously itchy from the increased blood flow and vibration of a 22 kg bike doing around 12 km an hour on an uneven path.  Within ten minutes, I’m a pro.

 

On first sight of the forest, the words of the exiled Vietnamese master, Thich Nhat Hanh, sound in my head; ‘I have arrived.  I am home’. I am awe-struck; don’t know whether to walk, sit, or stand. I reach my hand to the forest floor; its spongy, yielding layer is damp.  Around my feet a dozen different species of fungi sprout.  I crouch and examine the bionetwork of colourful fungus.  Some serious psilocybin going on here. 

 


 



 

But it is the largesse of the scene before me that renders me dumb. 

 


 

This enchantment and involuntary hijacking of my sensory field imbues a rush I’m unable to process.  I close my gaping mouth, quieten the need to do something.  Entering a forest of this scope is akin to crossing a threshold into a marginal place of otherness.   Something transcendent happens. The usual direction of my thoughts to the inner field does a one-eighty.  The pores of my skin unzip and open to the throb of the woodland as though they’ve set eyes on a dear old lost friend. I’ve been mourning my absence from the forest, and the strange thing is, I’ve barely even noticed it happen.  I gaze up, and see, not for the first time, the evidence of what Jane Hirshfield, poet and Zen practitioner refers to as ‘blind optimism’.  Here she is referring to the ability of trees to sightlessly trust the primal gravitational pull of the species to orient to the light.  It is the original act of fidelity to life itself.  The interdependence of the ecosystem here is so obvious and breathtaking, a symbiotic smorgasbord of co-operation and growth. I am undone.

 

 

Every so often, an artist by the name of David Digapony, spends a day in the forest, collects the fallen branches that project vertically off the trunk of the Redwood, and sculpts the timber into forms of beauty.  These forms are scattered throughout the forest.

 




Fourteen hundred Redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) occupy this plantation, a non-native species of the cypress family originating in California.  Sequoia sempervirens is among the tallest, widest, and oldest living trees on the planet.  With enough water and nutrients this species is known to live for 3000 years.  In the drought-ridden climate conditions of today, these statistics no longer apply.  The trees now form part of the Yarra Ranges National Park, and are a major tourist attraction.  How lucky am I to have had the park to myself?

 

 

                Unruly, black sheep Sequoia by the river in the township

 

I want to be more like a tree.  To trust in seasons of change, move to the rhythms of the cycles of life, urge my frail human heart to have faith in the shifting landscape of time.



 

 

 

 

Sunday, April 30, 2023

A day at a time

                                 

This was my Macpac, before I stupidly sold it some months ago. I was having a serious cull before moving out.  In the high stakes game of moving, I erroneously thought my travel days were over. Dumb! The backpack is synonymous with travel, freedom and adventure. In an era of the political, climate and capitalism refugee however, the humble backpack has adopted a new profile.  The Backpack Bed© has arrived, a waterproof, fire retardant, environmentally friendly home away from home. For the homeless.

 

This makes me angry, and sad.  I’ve been both these things a lot lately.  Because I too am now homeless. Is a Backpack Bed the best society can do? 

 

Being homeless could be the new black, especially in Melbourne where I'm currently located, but it’s most definitely the new norm.  It barely raises an eyebrow.  It’s a global crisis, women of my age its main target. It’s an utter disgrace. Fortunately, there are philanthropists out there, changing the face of the diabolical housing emergency, one dollar at a time.  There are also new laws creeping into town planning departments in local governments that are giving green lights to tiny houses and eco-villages and multiple occupancy land-sharing arrangements.  This may be good for the future, but in the meantime?  I recall feminists in the 70s advocating for and building refuges for women escaping domestic abuse so they didn’t end up on the streets.  Father Bob Maguire, bless the depth of his now deceased soul, also cared, and acted. Stirred by his distress at witnessing his father’s violence towards his mother in his early life, he spent his life supporting street kids, the disadvantaged and the homeless.  If you don’t know somebody who’s experiencing housing stress, you’re either not asking the right questions or living with your head in the sand.  We can’t leave this whole sorry mess to the government.  They're suffering blind paralysis. We need to do something but I feel powerless to know what, save for promoting organisations campaigning on behalf of the needy.  Like Womens Village Collective.  We need to rally together to make a difference.  I need hope!

 

So, Melbourne! City of my birth, culturally and artistically rich one minute, cold and bleak the next.  Over the years I've loved Melbourne from a distance; a two week stay is generally my limit.  Too much concrete, too smelly, too busy, too noisy.  I miss the green curves of home.  It's now three months, but feels like six. Housesitting, minding other people’s pets, camping, and wearing out my welcome at the homes of family and friends, wearing down their moods and wearing myself thin with anxiety.  Every day I scan the rentals and sub-lets on social media and community pages.  I’m competing with thousands. You have to be quick; they’re gone in a flash.  My impulses have slowed.  I read, write, walk, cook, try to be helpful and attempt to invoke the voice of my higher self.  I’m doing my best. 

 

Not having a home isn’t easy to talk about.  Too much awfulness inside bamboozles the mind and strangles rationality.  Hungry ghosts descend, whirling through your energy field, driving the intense emotional needs further down, strangling insight and calm. Attachments to early trauma and dysfunctional adult behavioural patterns re-emerge. I unconsciously become seriously judgy - of myself, and others.  Unkind thoughts surface, run laps around my consciousness as though there’s some grand prize on offer at the end. Thoughts like well, if you hadn’t travelled overseas last year, and done that big road trip around Australia the year before, perhaps you wouldn’t be in the situation you’re in now.  Perhaps if you’d bought a house years ago when they were more affordable you wouldn’t be in this position today.  Look at the lifestyle you’ve led! (fuck off Tony Abbott). Maybe if you’d looked after your declining mental health decades ago, you’d be more secure now.  I’ve even fallen into the trap of believing it’s all my fault.  I have to remind myself it’s not.  I’m not sure if I believe this narrative, or not.  It’s the fault of a sick system, I know this.  A system (see government) that fails to invest adequately in social housing, fails to support women fleeing family violence, fails to pay the underclass sufficient to live on. 

 

See what I mean? Judgy as fuck, an inheritance from my folks, the original judge and jury. It’s a difficult mantle to throw off, and in times of need, my neuroses step up like obedient little soldiers, conditioned to attack. They don’t wait for a second invite. Let’s go ride the Shame and Loathing Wheel.  But the humiliation of not having a safe place to lay your head at night is real.  I’ve been very unsocial, preoccupied and irritable.  The day in and day outness of having to rely on others for support and there being no light at the end of the tunnel is tough to live with. An itch that doesn’t go away. The worst sort of homesickness.

 

I drive into the rain, my metaphorical backpack bed's contents strewn untidily across the back of my car. 

 


It feels like 8 pm but it’s only 4.00.  I have no idea where I’m heading.  But I have my fleecy boots, my feathered sleeping bag, and my intuition is on high alert, scoping out the coastal road and its parks, one semi-arc of the wiper blades after another.

Tuesday, August 17, 2021

The rock of otherness

 


As a child, I had an Aboriginal friend.  I don’t remember her name. We were both day students at St Catherine’s Girls’ Orphanage in Geelong in the late 50s. It must have been a conveniently located school/child disciplinary centre, as I was not an orphan. In my mind’s eye I can still see the well-to-do home where my friend lived.  In adulthood, when I realised my friend must have been part of the Stolen Generation, I felt sad, and sick.    I remember her as quiet, warm, and kind.  I feel like crying.

 

Cut to Alice Springs June 2021.  My sister Margaret and I have been to the Tip Shop for an exhibition of recycled sculptural pieces, and have ventured into town for a drink.  We wander in and out of a couple of venues before passing The Rock Bar.  The large windows on both sides of the door present a view inside.  Immediately obvious is the fact the place is full of Indigenous people. I’m instantly taken aback.  I’ve never seen a pub with only Indigenous people inside, like never in my life. 

 

‘Evening ladies!’ the white guy at the door ventures as we pass.  We nod, grin, and keep walking.  Within a few strides, I stop. ‘Shall we go back?’ I want in. I want to unsee colour. We stall for a minute, Margaret slightly more hesitant, and head back. 

 

‘Coming in?’ the same guy asks, a wide smile creasing his animated face.  He walks us to the bar, and stays close for a few minutes.  He’s looking after us, I muse, aware of a creeping discomfort in my bones.  Our whiteness attracts an intense gaze.  I’m seen.  This is ironic because I’ve spent a good deal of my life thinking about this very subject, the importance of being seen, and heard. During my travels in the past five months, I’ve felt othered.  Being single and travelling roads traversed by mainly couples I’ve felt excluded from conversation, excluded from the status quo, ignored. 

 

This is different though. I’m seen in circumstances where I feel I don’t belong. 

 

We’re escorted out the back where a crowd of a couple of hundred people are dancing enthusiastically to an upbeat Aboriginal band, MB Reggae. They’re good. Apart from the guy on the sound desk, we’re the only whites out here as well.  Although I’m barely seeing outside my own uneasiness, I feel a probing gaze that unsettles and unnerves me.

 

It’s not long before a woman approaches us, puts her arm around my shoulders.  We bob along to the sounds.  A couple more women approach us, their sociability reassuring.   I pull out my tobacco pouch to roll a smoke, and offer it, the women taking a pinch, rolling it in the palm of their hands and placing it in their mouths.   Tooth to jowl, the crowd whoops and cheers, their fists raised, their solidarity compelling. 

 

But all is not well within.  A couple of times I look around.  The mob is eighty per cent men, many dancing, many holding up the walls.  The feeling of scrutiny creates a terrible discordance.  I’m at sea, unable to reconcile my intuitive sense we don’t belong, are unwelcome. I feel a hand on my arm and turn.  A woman catches me off guard, whispers in my ear. ‘… men rape … you’re not safe’.  I look her in the eye, see her upset, her insistence.  She is protecting us.  ‘Go home.’ She repeats, over and over. 

 

So this is what othering feels like. A particularly insidious, too-common characteristic of the world we live in. 

 

Stepping outside my comfort zone has had a positive effect though. My empathy has grown muscle, given voice to that part of me that feels for and cares about the lived experience of the marginalised, and vulnerable.     

 

I wanted to not see colour.  Who was I kidding?  Sixty years on from my childhood experience, the awful reality of division continues. 

 

 

Thursday, June 17, 2021

The Gibb aka Testosterone Theme Park

 

With a once in a lifetime opportunity arising to spend time with my sister Margaret from Hobart and daughter Pia from Brisbane in Alice Springs in June/July, two options were available to get there. More bitumen, or dirt.  Having spent excessive weeks on bitumen in the past month, like thousands of kms of it, in Broome I began to seriously consider the Gibb River Road, challenging every sensible conclusion I’d previously entertained about the reality of gravel roads, the stamina it entailed, and the suffocating dust.  Not to mention my relatively constant anxiety about the reliability of my rig and what the fuck happens if I bust a tyre or suspension, or shatter the windscreen with no mobile reception?    

 

At the caravan park I approached a number of people with red dust on their vehicles.  The first was a woman.  Her husband was out of earshot!  I often find women’s perspectives vary enormously from that of men.  The road was shit, she offered with creased brow, the corrugation shit, the hours long, the tension to the body exhausting.  We screwed the shockers on our 4 X 4 caravan, she said with raised eyebrows.   Right, I thought, that’s that! No fucking way. 

 

Some hours later I ventured out again.  This time I spoke to a guy.  Whilst he considered the road ‘poor’ he brought his map over to my site and together we studied the rivers and waterholes that traverse the road.  I found my mindset shift.  As a water sign in astrological terms, the enthusiasm he expressed for the gorges and waterfalls and swimming holes had a weighty and positive effect on me. My mind did a 180-degree pivot.

 

On the morning of my departure, unsure of correct tyre pressure I was directed to another camper, an engineer who’d also just completed the crossing.  ‘Good strong rig you’ve got there’ he said, ‘you’ll be fine’.  His assurances were medicine to my mind.  Slow down, watch out for the sea of pointy rocks that jut out unexpectedly from the road, they’ll split your tyres, and have fun.

 

In the final analysis, the road was indeed shit! Your ability to enjoy the landscape on either side of the road is compromised as your gaze is continually fixed on the road five metres ahead, always on guard for those shitty sharp rocks.  How can you enjoy the sights when your body's as rigid as said rocks?  Travelling at between 20 to 50 kph, I could manage only a couple of hours driving a day, at most. If you can imagine those long white plastic tubes electricians have on their vehicles, and then imagine them coloured brown/red and lined up at right angles to the road, you’re on the way to visualising the experience.   I was sometimes so exasperated by the hoons sitting on 80 kph, whose speed would send up great clouds of red dust, blinding the driver travelling in the opposite direction, I would pull over and curse loudly, and send them a retrospective finger!  It came to me that the Gibb was their testosterone theme park, an adventure to be seized at maximum hormone levels. Carpe diem! Observing vehicles pulled over at the side of the road, ripped tyres, busted shockers, and a roll-over or two, often vehicles I recognised as having passed me at great speed, was cold comfort.   I learnt to navigate the road with trepidation and caution. 

 

The magnificence of course is in the pause that occurs when you reach your destination.  The national parks and gorges and soaring ripe apricot coloured escarpments and quirky roadhouses and waterholes and characters on the path I’ll remember to the end.  I’ve attained my Certificate 101 in Creek and River Crossings!  The key is in gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles, keeping revs up, and hoping for the best!  The knowledge that I completed The Gibb without injury to body or machine is a mini triumph to my sense of adventure. 

 

 
Boab Prison Tree, 1500 years old.  This is a site where Aboriginal men and women were enslaved by whites to work in the pearling industry on the coast. 

 

 

 
 

 

 
Images from Windjana National Park.  Can you see the crocs (freshwater ones) in the last image?
 
Look at the utter brilliance of this bowerbird's bow.
 
 A view from the road, including those deadly rocks.
 
 
'What do you think you look like?' Said with narrowed eyes, my mother would have abhorred this image.  A woman your age should not wear such short shorts.  Mutton dressed up as lamb!  I include it here to silence judgement.  This is just before I stripped off. 
 
 
I have no idea what this plant is but I was totally enamoured by it.  Perhaps someone could enlighten me.
 
Likewise with this one. 
 
Bella mama tree
Durack camp site
 
 
My camp at Pentecost River.  Here I defied the crocs, and Scomo, by having a quick dip.  Later I learned a six metre saltwater croc, the dangerous kind, cruised along the bank at dusk, checking out visitors.  My neighbours thought me barking mad, which of course I occasionally am! 

 
Genteel me, at El Questro Station. Mum would approve!

 




Wednesday, May 5, 2021

Trees and heartsong

Here in Ceduna I’m on pause.  At the edge of the big desert, I’m resting and walking, waiting for friends to catch up to cross the Nullabor together, in convoy. The caravan park I've chosen is the runt of the litter. It’s cheap. I feel home. My tribe.  There’s something about most caravan parks that make me feel I don’t belong.  They’re full of big shiny caravans and motorhomes, packed in like sardines, their occupiers rarely leaving the safety of their metal homes. Generally, I bush camp, but when I do rarely stay in them, I feel uncomfortable.  Unless I initiate a conversation, a condition I am compelled to do as I crave human company, I’m not approached.  It’s as if a woman travelling solo is a threat to some unwritten order.

 

It feels edgy, the town centre eerily quiet.  Poised on the precipice between trees and the Nullabor, meaning place of no trees, in this small patch of otherness, it is the trees and the expectation of company that render my heart still.  Their presence represents strength, resilience, composure, commitment. 

 

 

The earth is the colour of ground coriander seeds, a tinge of pink elevating its taupe.  A dozen dignified big gums frame the caravan park, enclosed by corrugated iron, worn horizontally.    Rusty car bodies, their tyres long dead, lounge lazily in the dirt. The camp kitchen emanates a rotten egg odour.  In an attempt to stem the errant jets of water on the shower head last night, the rebel squirts, my gut involuntarily lurched.  Have you ever felt a slimy shower head?  It’s more a park for locals, or retreat for those who’ve fallen on hard times than a travellers rest stop.  Of course, it’s both.   Pre-fabricated cabins, products of another century colonise the haphazard space.  To my left is a couple from Kilmore in Victoria who must turn around and return home; ‘my father died’.   To my right, a guy living in a boat who offered to help me put up my obstreperous awning last night, and another guy with a Ned Kelly beard who cleans the park to save money to repair his Troopy.  Should I mention the benefits of Domestos? 

                                         

The view from my Camp Hilton @ Ceduna

 

But it’s not just trees. It’s moments when a flight of swallows rise from the bushes as you pass on the isolated highway, their perfect synchronisation and sway a thing of beauty. The contours of bald hills that seem to defy the flat lay of the land. Gravel roads to who-knows-where, intersecting main arteries, pathways that knead you to remember once all roads were tracks. Striations of spectral colour, the red and orange of daybreak. The feel of movement on the body as I steer the truck across country, the vibration of the ocean crashing against the shoreline while I dream of destiny, living on rubber atop the cliffs where land meets ocean.

 

Port Gibbon campsite

 


For the time being, I'm practising being my selfie!

 

 

 

My heart sings. And I’ve finally taken my uke out of its case.  But that's another story. 

 

 

Saturday, April 24, 2021

Selfie vs Country

  A selfie? Of gnarly feet!  But check out my campsite.

Spending time in spaces of incredible natural beauty with handfuls of other tourists this week, I’ve intersected with lots of selfie-takers. I find the world of selfies cringe-worthy! It really grates.  Maybe it’s a boomer thing, the relative absence of technology in the era I grew up, a valorisation of the past.   Don’t get me wrong, faces are fascinating, their shape, contours, creases, the eyes, everything. I understand the arguments that selfies express personal agency and identity, its fluidity, construction.  Everyone needs to be seen, and heard, and selfies excel at this. Images are a language too. But a selfie foregrounds the self, fails to show the spaces we inhabit, the wonder of nature.  In the vacuum of climate change, a condition largely a result of human greed and disregard for the living earth that sustains us, it feels critical to direct attention away from the self, and focus on service, care and respect for country.


So you won’t be seeing selfies from me.  If you do, know I’ve been kidnapped, maybe even dead, and someone’s hacked my computer.  I'm making an exception for the selfie of the feet!


It’s my last day on Kangaroo Island (KI).  I love how locals welcome you on the road with that raised finger signal. No, not that one! The one that smiles, says hello, having a good day?  I remember a similar gesture in the early days in Mullumbimby.  Drivers raising their pointers from the steering wheel in salutation. It’s probably a rural or remote thing.

 

I’m disappointed not to have seen a koala. During the devastating fires in Adelaide and Kangaroo Island a little over a year ago, over three-quarters of the koala population perished.  We all saw images on TV and social media during the 2019/20 bushfires of the effect wrought on species like the koala.  It breaks my heart. I recently read an article that explores why humans are so emotionally charmed by the koala.  Apparently we attribute human qualities to them, that is, they share characteristics with babies.  I did give birth to one relatively hairy baby, but I'm not sure she'd appreciate being likened to a gumleaf-eating tree-dweller!  Anyhow, locals assure me the koala residents are being well cared for by the wellspring of adorers all over the country, nurturing and rehabilitating them in specially dedicated koala hospitals in three Australian states. 

 

The bush is recovering too, parading extraordinary resilience (see pics below), bursting with brilliance.  This happens in spite of a seemingly universal common indifference to country, multispecies and diversity.

 

Kangaroo Island weather’s been Melbournesque.  Cloudy, rainy, sunny, windy, warm, and really fucking cold.  I’ve fished out the thermals. Congratulated myself a couple of times for having the foresight to pack the sheep!

 

Disclaimer! In my time on the road, I’ve attempted the selfie twice.  The result revealed my arm was way too short, my face occupying two-thirds of the frame.  The camera must also be faulty! Hear me when I say I’m doing you a favour by abstaining from the selfie. 

 

Enjoy the images of our beautiful, rich, fascinating country.

Stokes Bay campground, I prefer gnarly trees to feet. 
 


These images are taken in Flinders Chase National Park @ Cape de Couedic in the far west of the island.  Over 90% of the park burnt. The wild beauty of destruction and despair.  Such resilience.


Sunbaking seals at Cape de Couedic
 
Admiral's Arch, the seal's hood
 
 
I see a deranged dinosaur

 And a sad pig



The 'Remarkable Rocks', by no other name. At Flinders Chase Nat Park as well.   Seeing and feeling the energy and symbology and strength of Uluru here.
 
  
Curlew doing a tap dance
 
At the Raptor Domain. The masked owl.  I swear he was eyeballing me. 
 
Magnificent coastline @ Weir's Cove
 
I'd driven 30 kms on a gravel, heavily corrugated road and had just turned onto the bitumen.  I think I was tired! I did a double take.  Thinking I might have seen a ghost, I stopped, and reversed.  

 
Back to the road now