The Mountain

Marsupial resort

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lone kangarooApart from the many Eastern red-necked wallabies, I share my place with small groups of other hoppy marsupials.

Only a few wallaroos come by, usually a small family trio, but this male has been hanging about the little dam on his own lately.

I wonder if he’s grown up and been asked to move out? As you can see, he doesn’t seem at all bothered by me and in fact lay down and went to sleep while I was there.

So I think he must have been raised around here to be so used to me and my behaviour.

Unmistakable with his long shaggy fur and broader features, he is not as dark all over as the males usually are, while the females are pale grey. It will be interesting to see if he changes.
kangaroos sunning
Later, after the sun had come out, I spotted a family of kangaroos sunbathing and snoozing at the same spot on the grassy bank.

Clearly a popular resort: for the food and drink, the water views and the entertainment of watching me go about my strange business in the house yard just up the hill.

After the storm

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I am heartily sick of the rain and the storms: the hillsides perpetually oozing water and the tracks washing away on the slopes and forming into deep mudslides in the gullies; keeping up dry kindling and wood; feeding the horses in a damp Drizabone coat and dripping Akubra hat—which also has holes in the top; keeping up with where the elusive leak in my roof will manifest itself next in the house…

I bemoan the inaction on global warming that is causing such unseasonal climate chaos worldwide, but if I have to have almost daily storms, I hope to have more of such beauty afterwards. No matter how many rainbows one sees, they are never clichéd—despite Judy Garland.

mountain rainbow
Think I’ll have to write another book just so I can have this on the cover.

Mountain morning

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mountain mist
A wet season here means lots of mornings when the day hasn’t yet decided what it will do.

At 3000 feet, my place is inside the clouds as they hover between earth and sky, unable to rise above the nearby higher mountains of 5000 feet or more.

When they do begin to lift, the sun gets its chance in often spectacular ways. From the window over my kitchen sink, I get a great view of this brief beauty to the north-east.

Up my track and through the forest, the ordinary is illuminated by a lighting effects whizz.

Spotlit, backlit and highlit, alternating softening and scintillating lenses—trees and tussocks, bracken and bark, mud and puddles—all transformed.

What a start to the day—good morning, mountain!

Ephemeral jewels

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jewel web
Sometimes Nature throws up a combination that takes my breath away with its beauty.

In the wet wet world of my mountain this year, water droplets are nothing special, yet one morning they got together with a complex and multi-level spider’s web to create a stunner.

Diamonds, pearls, and the finest silver wire, netted and looped and swagged between a stringybark tree and the elkhorn I have growing on another stringy close by.

Half an hour later and the jewels had evaporated. It was ‘just’ an admirable web.

Coincidentally, these tree trunks rise from the very spot chosen by the slime moulds of a few months ago.

Given that this is only a few metres uphill from my outdoor, door-less toilet, is it any wonder that I prefer not to have a door? Think what I’d miss!

Looking up

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angophora growthWhen walking along the forest tracks, I am usually so busy keeping my eyes directed downwards for snakes—and currently for the rare dry strips between the puddles—that I don’t often look up to the treetops.

And besides, to do so I’d have to stop, which is when the army of leeches gets its chance.

‘Up and at’ er!’ comes the order, and within seconds the troops are climbing up my gumboots.

But last week I did stop, and in all the years I’ve driven past this spot, I’ve never noticed this particular angophora tree.

Angophoras twist and turn by nature, but I haven’t seen one pout before!

Mountain salon and studio

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jay jay scott
This week I ferried some unusual visitors in over the rough and muddy roads to my mountain. Not Mohammed, but equally unlikely, I’d have thought.

They had driven for four hours—and would return the same way—simply to take a photograph of me. Freelance writer Rosamund Burton has written a story on me for Notebook magazine and Notebook insisted on sending a hair and makeup artist and a photographer to my house for it. They clearly like to be authentic—that is, on location and up-to-date, and professional—no happy snaps taken by me.

So Jay Jay Rauwenhoff, a freelancer who loves the variety of places to which her skill takes her, opened up her two shoulder bags and one suitcase full of pots and potions and styling tools, set up her hair and beauty salon on my verandah and proceeded to ‘make me up’ and style my hair.

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Sunset moon

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mountain sunsetMy last full moon teamed up with the sun for a brief pas de deux between their respective acts.

To my north-east, the soft pinks and blues of a reflected sunset are always more delicate than the vibrant western reality, but this time the former won my attention, with a pearl of a moon rising above a long low cloud bank over the mountains.

Until the final curtain fell, the changing light was the most evident feature, with my foreground garden and forest turning to black, demanding the flash on my camera, while on the far stage the blues intensified and the pinks flushed dark rose and lilac before reaching for the deep purple of late twilight.

Through all this light and colour action the moon simply stayed where she was, steadily gaining a more luminous prominence, biding her time until the sun would have finished its flamboyant exit display — and it would be her stage alone, with no light but her own.

To the west the sun’s act always lasts longer, bolder and brighter — but it cannot ever dance with the moon.

My last picture shows the ‘real’ sunset.

The perversity of nature

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This piece was recently broadcast on ABC Radio National’s Bush Telegraph program:

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Being hopeless with machinery, and living a long way from town, I treat any mechanically-minded visitor as a precious opportunity. There’s always some collection of moving metal parts that’s refusing to function. This time it was my pump.

I’d excused it slowing down a bit, given that the old Ajax and its partner, the Lister diesel engine, were getting on.

For nearly 30 years they’ve squatted over by my dam, ready to be cranked into action at three monthly intervals, and pump steadily up to my cement tanks on the ridge — 200 feet of head. The faithful pair would work continuously for 24 hours without complaint.

The Lister had been overhauled once, and the Ajax had its leather seals replaced once — but not by me.

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After the fires

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Five years after our last bad fire, the eucalypt forest has recovered. On the rough and furrowed trunks of the stringybark trees, bunches of dead stems fan out like whiskers, or bony-fingered hands.

When all their normal mop heads of gum leaves were burnt, these emergency feeder leaves sprouted straight out of the blackened trunks, all the way up to the top and along the branches. The forest became an alien one of upraised claws, presenting an increasingly furry silhouette as the suckers emerge.

It was a transitional landscape, for now the mop heads are back and doing their job. The interim sucker leaves are dead and fallen, and eventually their dry stems will break off too.  The blackened bark will remain so.

After fire

In the more rainforest areas, where the trees do not have this special survival tactic, normality is far slower to return — if ever.

But there are a few protected pockets where isolated offspring of the fallen are growing strongly. In the lee of one dead wattle, as its bark cracks and peels off, a Native Bleeding Heart tree (Omalanthus populifolius) and a Giant Stinging Tree (Dendrocnide excelsa) reach for the sky.

In fact, both have heart-shaped leaves. My mind leapfrogs to connections, connotations — to Richard the Lionheart, Braveheart, to ‘coeur’ — courage, to courage under fire — and after fire?

After fire2

Fairy fungi?

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Delicate yet rubbery, translucently flesh-coloured, looking more like fairy breast enhancers than fungi, these odd little cups appeared on my shadehouse ‘floor’ over a week ago and have sat there, unchanged, ever since.

Breast enhancer fungi

I love the way fungi just pop up where they’ve never been seen before, prop for a while to propagate in slow, strange and secret ways, then simply wizen and disappear.

Not so unlike human lives, I suppose.

So if the fairies are trying to look like Barbies, maybe this fungi, that came up in my orchard last Autumn, belonged to Ken?

Kenfungus

If anyone can identify these sexy fungi please leave me a comment . My fungi book is old and short on colour illustrations (Common Australian Fungi, Tony Young, NSW University Press, 1983).  I need a better one – any recommendations?

Icy records

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This morning broke several winter records at my place. They won’t impress some of you hardy Tableland and Tassie types, but their rarity here sure impressed me.

At 7am, the sunlight not yet having found us, it was zero degrees on my verandah, which we have had on rare occasions before. What struck me was the whiteness beyond.

I am in the habit of saying ‘Oh, we don’t really get frosts; too high up, you know. Just a little on the mulch now and then.’ I can say that no longer. I don’t know what is normal weather to ‘get’ any more.

Frozen birdbath

The whole yard was iced: the solar panels, grass, rocks, small shrubs. The birdbath water was frozen solid, the horse tub had an 8mm icy crust.

Frozen dam

But what caught my eye was a strange texture down on the little dam. In disbelief I approached, still in my slippers, so treading gingerly, with childhood memories of frosty slips and bruised bottoms.

Out the gate and crunching over frozen mud decorated with delicately ice-edged hoof prints – equine Brandy Alexanders.

The whole dam was iced over. Not thick enough for skating, but too thick to break with a tap of my foot.

Sharyn Munro’s dam at noon

In fact, it was still frozen at noon, when the sun had long been sparkling over its criss-cross crystal patterns.

Today, plants went down with frostbite that have been here for decades.

Today, I thought of a future like this, with ongoing unpredictable extremes, as has already been happening—unseasonable snow, heatwaves, bushfires, floods. How will farmers cope?

Mountain ‘roads’

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Up here the rain falls long and hard; the trees grow tall and the ruts in our clay roads grow ever deeper.

The Council classes them as ‘Unmaintained Roads’ and that they surely are.

The 13-16 inches we received in those June downpours have just about rendered this 3.5 km section of my primary access road as ineligible for the term ‘road’.

My little Suzi can just squeeze beside some of the worst ruts – when the road is dry and smoothed out a bit.

Mountain Road

In the wet times she has to straddle the chasm as we edge our way down the steep hill. One slip and I’d be either stuck in thick clay churned up by other struggling vehicles, or do an axle.

I keep telling myself it could be worse: I could be battling to get home in three lanes of endless and almost stationary traffic.