So We Are Married to This Ground: Walk with Me Poetica

It's the wattles that shout that Spring is coming. They splash themselves across the canvas of blue skies boisterously. There's no shyness in a wattle. They cavort and whisper, dance and carouse, with no shame at all for their flamboyancy. They're through and through Australian, and although they make us sneeze, die within ten years after going quite straggly, and drop leaves all over cars, we love them passionately.

The wattle trees are brandishing their many shades of gold

The blizzards of the mountains crack the granite, with their cold,

They roar across the mountains, like a wave across the sea

And the yellow-foaming wattle keeps the love alight in me.

- Denis Kravens

The trees here are mainly ironbarks with black trunks, and I wonder of the Warudjeri here that used to walk amongst them. Long gone now. I wonder at the majesty of their possum skin cloaks, the small dwellings made of twigs and bark. The walk through what's called the Ironbark basin overlooks a marine park on some sections and is one of my favourite walks on this coast. It's full of echidnas and wallabies, tiny grasses catching the light, wizened trees and bone white dead wood, clay steps and in some sections, warning signs about snakes. There's houses on the edge of it - far too expensive for us to buy, though we'd love to. There's grass trees and sedges, rosellas and kookaburras, tiny lizards and little blue wrens, mushrooms and mud and the smell of the earth. Most times I walk on the beach, but today the tide was too high and my spirit leapt up the path ahead of me so I had little choice.

An illustration of a possum skin cloak on a sign on the walk. Once, we didn't have signs here, and they make the place lose it's wildness a little.

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How close they lived to the earth, and how bereft they were torn from it. The path twines through their land, really, but when you're born and raised on it too, you also feel a sense of ownership. Such is the Australian dilemma.

The gum with it's glittering leaves

Is sparking in the sunny light

And around my leafy home it weaves

It's dancing shade with flow'rets bright

- Unknown, written by an aboriginal mother in a Sydney newspaper, 1880

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I want to share Kinsella's poem about lichen in the moonlight, but the sun is out, and it doesn't fit. But it does embrace the rocks, holds tight, glows in the shade of the trees. Up close the tiny stems of tiny plants hold their throats toward the sun.

as lichen

embroiders the face of granite

as lichen

seduces the fallen log

as lichen

rings the stem of the rose

as lichen

caresses the knot in the bark

as lichen

paints the fence-post orange

as lichen

flowers boldly in the mist

so we are married to this ground

- Nicola Bowery

So we are married to this ground. What a beautiful line. I feel that, out in the crisp late Winter air, walking this familiar path, along this familiar coast. Even when I was far from it I felt it's presence in my heart. The joy in the home coming, the embrace of the sea. The laugh of a kookaburra. Did the kookaburra sing the world into blessed existence, or did the world sing in the kookaburra?

There are traces of ochre on the path - there were paint mines here once. We used to run through with stripes of paint on our faces as kids, and such is the joy I feel today that I want to do it again. It's funny, the disconnected thoughts that come to us when we have space to listen. There's a real enjoyment to these musings, little poems bursting in my head. My fingertips will be soft all day with the clay.

I love this coast. This path in particular, this beach in particular. Dad and I would ride the horses through the bush, back when no one worried about those things. We'd ride them naked along the beach, me and my bestfriend and no one was around to see. Now, getting close to the trail that leads back up to the carpark, I can hear cars - people here to walk dogs, to paddle out and try their luck with the waves. It's less busy than other beaches, but still, it's not solely my beach anymore.

For years my friend's Dad and his mates would tear down the sign that led down to this beach. Every time the council put it up, they'd pull it down again. No one was allowed to surf on his break - not if they wanted to risk him shouting at them or staring them out. He can't surf any more - his back gave in. He's having a hard time with that, as you can imagine. He too was married to this ground, and unable to walk it anymore or paddle out in the wild waves, he's bereft as you would be, losing a spouse.

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