Rainforest  oddities

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I have shared flora finds in Sea Acres National Park (Port Macquarie) before, but each time I walk there I see new things!

It’s not your typical rainforest, as it has pockets of eucalypts growing there too, no doubt from past weather events where trees fell and light was allowed in.

As you know, details attract me and while there are many palm strips caught on vines, this one looked so like washing hung out to dry that I had to share it.

Speaking of vines, I saw one very odd and striking vine here, that looks like lacquered and polished cane, but curving. It is apparently Flagellaria indica, Whip Vine or Supplejack.

Growing to about 15 metres, its parts had many uses amongst indigenous people, and birds love its white berries.

Right beside the boardwalk is this brightly coloured and quirkily shaped tree trunk. I looked it up in the Centre’s useful information books and it is a rainforest myrtle, Glossia bidwilii, Python Tree, so called for its blotchy markings.

The shape is not accounted for.

Now how did I miss this before?!

The main plants you notice here are the palms, and I especially love the patterns made by the fan-shaped leaves of the Cabbage Palms (Livistona australis).

Taller, and usually in groves, are the stately Bangalow Palms (Archontophoenix cunninghiamia).

Beneath them, the spent palm leaves seem to block out most other plants; an effective mulch.

At a distance in the forest (sorry about the blurry zoomed image) I could see a strange crown-of-thorns-looking growth feature halfway up a tree. It was as if two trees had been butted roots-to-roots in a grafting attempt.  I could but try to imagine what had gone on here.

If only trees could talk…or at least in a language we could understand.

Nature’s sunny side

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I was hurrying to beat the sun before it rose over the sea’s horizon and became too bright to photograph.

I failed, but Nature still gave me a spectacular display.

While the land and sea were still largely cloaked in the greys and blacks of the previous night, on either side of the hill known as Nobbys, the sun was proclaiming the day.

Within seconds, that daily wonder had risen far enough to be making its way across the water to be colouring the coast.

How come this is a free show every day? Somebody should tax it…

Maybe this is the compensation we get for the loss of such golden people as Janet Cohen, who could see both dark and sunny sides of life.

Even on less showy starts to a day, when the sunshine really is reluctant to come out from behind the clouds, we can be sure it’s there, and that the colours will return to our landscape.

I doubt the bombarded people of the Middle East would be seeing much more than the grey of the rubble that once was their home – and the red of the blood from people, friends, family.

How do they hold on to the sunny side when it is just a memory?

What side of Nature would be visible in Gaza? 

As I walk home, I marvel at the extended free show, at the sunrise reflecting on the glass patio panels of an apartment block.

I vow to hang on to that sunny side of life, despite all the darkness we are seeing spread across the world, as an ignorant bully inflicts his tantrums on so many innocent people.

Here we are safe from bombs, so that in itself has to be seen as part of the sunny side, albeit clouded over. Although far away, we are certainly impacted, as felt by the $3.30 a litre I paid for diesel last time I topped up my little van.

Mere ripples from the bad-tempered stamping feet of the bully…

Familiar dystopia

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I did not think I would feel like doing a post so soon but this is what I’d have been telling Janet had she lived… so now I’m telling you!

I was given an op shop book that by chance is highly resonant, set in places I know well, have camped in and have protested in, and dealing with issues close to my heart.

It is set in the future, where humans have continued on their current trajectory of stuffing things up in the natural world, of being greedy and human-centric, so it’s not a good future. Hence we would say it’s dystopian, that is, the opposite of utopian.

But sadly, the world Inga Simpson has evoked is so close to what we are now doing and seeing that it is eerily familiar.

Siding Springs Observatory in the Warrumbungles features large in this terrific and terrifying book, as does the Dark Sky rating and the Artesian Basin we are trying to protect from the Santos Narrabri gas project.

The main characters race through well-known parts of the amazing volcanic Warrumbungles, on to the precious Pilliga, heading to Mount Kaputar near Narrabri. It’s a great story as well as scarily realistic.

When I went to Mount Kaputar, I was entranced by its differences, but also horrified to be able to see the spoil heaps of the Boggabri area mines even from there.  And the pollution.

I urge everyone to read this book: anyone who cares about what is happening in the north west, about the gas project, the pipeline, the tragedy of Maules Creek, the likelihood of losing so much more if the ill-approved Santos project goes ahead.

It is well-written, totally credible, very place-based, and deals with the social and environmental issues we are all anxious about now.

I use World of Books to get secondhand copies of books, with free delivery, so have immediately ordered another of her books, ’Where the trees were’, from them. How did I not know of her passionate and clever writing?

Please, go find a copy of The Thinnings; this is where we are heading.

Thank you, Inga Simpson. And brava.

No Janet, no blog

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The trip to Clunes and subsequent camping in Victoria was meant to inspire lots of blog posts. The soaring price of diesel just had to be borne: I’d booked everything, and after all, we weren’t being bombed…

However, by the time I got to Goulburn on 16th March, the whole trip was under a different, darker cloud, as I learnt that my lovely friend Janet Cohen had suddenly died that day.

She – and we – knew that her time was coming, but I thought she had months of gradual decline in which we could farewell each other. After 12 years of cancer treatments, she was in the last stage of that battle, planning on using the Voluntary Assisted Dying outlet, the legislation for which she had fought long and hard.

When I was undergoing radiation for a skin cancer on my face, at the same unit she used, Janet sent me the photo above. It sums up her attitude to the ‘dance of life’ and, to the raw deal she’d been dealt. I loved it.

I’d been looking forward to regaling Janet with tales from this trip, and so had she. After her death, so many things went wrong that I felt that my world was as out of kilter as the loss of a wonderful person like Janet could… and should … mean.

I just wanted to get home, to be in the same area as she had lived so I could believe she was really no longer here. And maybe her spirit was partly lingering. I don’t think it is, but her absence does seem more dreadfully real here.

On the long drive home, I thought of many words to describe her, and because I write to try to make sense of life, I have to use words to make sense of her death.

Janet was a beautiful mix of qualities:

Radiant and rational

Life-loving and love-giving

Feisty and fair-minded

Spritely and spiritual

Activist and artist

Natural and nature-caring

Gracious and generous

She was passionate about social and environmental injustice and brought her clear thinking and considerable intelligence to any issue.

She was the most kindred of the very few kindred spirits I have been fortunate to meet in my life.

I had feared the words on my CDs would cause more weeping, but when back in more familiar territory I played the ‘O Brother’ CD. While there is plenty of loss and dying in those songs, I found one that seemed appropriate to Janet’s attitude. Its message was ‘Keep on the sunny side of life’, that no matter how dark and dreary days may be, the sun will always shine again.

I know Janet was as troubled by the world’s events as the rest of us, but somehow she could put things in perspective, even if not exactly optimistic.

Vale, Janet. 

The sparkle and sunshine you radiated in this ‘dance of life’ will be greatly missed by many.

Deep sadness dwells in me. 

I look at the half-read book Janet recommended I get, The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller, and vow to begin it again. Maybe some of her grace and acceptance will come to me.

Catch up and Clunes

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Readers will notice that I have finally got around to getting a more up-to-date photo of myself on this page. 

My daughter took the old one on my 68th birthday, and as I am now 78. it was way past time for my author image to catch up with my age!

It’s not easy to accept how one is ageing, nor to find a friend who is patient enough to tolerate my reluctance in ‘posing’.

So thanks Jane, for being so willing!

And to bite another bullet, I am taking ‘Peeping through my fingers’ to Victoria, for the Clunes Booktown Festival on 21st and 22nd March.  I’d been wanting to go for years, but as a book-loving spectator, not a participant.

I want my short stories read more widely; these are mostly award-winners, and my biggest wins have been in Victorian competitions (The Alan Marshall and the Boroondara), and my writers’ residencies have been in Victoria too. Plus the Owner Builder Magazine, for which I used to write, was based here, in Dunolly.

So I won’t feel too out of place.

If you are going to it, do come by and say hello! I’m in a Writers’ Tent, stall FE

One cloudy morning

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It would not be recognisable as a Port Macquarie skyline without the ever-present pine trees. 

On this particular morning, the skies above them were my focus, as the cloud show was extraordinarily varied, in pictures and patterns, in colours and connotations, in figures and fancies.

I have often shared sunrises or sunsets, and feel obliged to do a little bit of that here, as the seascape sunrise is always a treat, but today what’s above those strips and swirls of colour are more interesting.

If you think blue skies are boring, and prefer the endless mystery of cloud shows, you might like The Cloud Appreciation Society, to which my friend and webmaster Fred Baker introduced me. Check it out.

Blue skies are made interesting by clouds, so a little bit of blue is allowed to peep through for contrast. 

I kept almost tripping over as I walked about ‘with my head in the clouds’, looking up and twisting backwards in case I was missing another ephemeral wonder.

Whether the clouds were white or grey or both, they were making so many different images up there that I couldn’t keep up.

The display above Nobbys itself seemed to emanate from it, radiating like a bridal veil into the blue.

But today I think the unlimited shades and shapes of grey clouds have won me over; I almost want to delete that distracting bit of colour on the horizon…

Like here. From pearly grey to almost black, from wisps and lace to ripples and smudges, from haloes to heavy linings… I love these clouds!

Macedon memories

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I was recently reminded of my wonderful 2010 nature writing residency at Rosebank in Victoria, thanks to the Victorian Writers Centre. It was a world of mists and deciduous trees, of old gardens and evocative rocks.

The lovely old stone cottage was dwarfed by the huge oak tree at its front.

I met my first medlar tree there– a living mediaeval curio.

I saw streets lined with golden autumn leaves, as here in what I think was Lancefield, where they had a great Saturday market-in-the-mist.

I roamed all around the Macedon area, including Cobaw State Forest and its sleeping boulders.

For a fungi-lover like me, the cool high country was full of hitherto unseen treasures.

Of course I went to Hanging Rock, very early before the school hordes arrived. As I heard the pan pipes playing in my head, I can see how Miranda could have disappeared… no path was obvious…

And the Rock does not exactly hang, but is scarily wedged.

When I left, this is what I wrote in the guest book:

‘I came to Rosebank from the bush, not the city, but it has been no less a new experience – a taste of rural civilisation in this quaint cottage of honeycomb-hued stone, with only the roos and the smell of woodsmoke to remind me of home.

I take away a mind full of fresh sensory treasures to colour and flavour stories yet to be written. Many were close at hand: the awesome Oak; the crunch of its acorns underfoot; the strange sci-fi fruit with its pronged antennae that turned out to be the mediaeval Medlar; the bright yellow carpet that the Twisted Willow bestowed, after filling the lap of the last chair of summer with gold; the graceful hot pink and orange drooping of of the European Spindle bush; sunlit morning mist turning the sheep on the hill pink; the cute little mouse that grew bolder each night, and its astonishing capacity for pellet production.

‘Some were further afield and higher up: snow gums and mosses and bright fungi, including my first Fly Agaric, the archetypal white-dotted glossy red toadstool of childhood fairtytales. 

Most of all, I will remember the rocks – on Cobaw and Hanging Rock and the Camel’s Hump – great rounded creatures with mottled hides, like stranded humpback whales; the pockmarked guardian pinnacles at the Rock which does not hang, but straddles; only its freckled bulbous stomach, under which I scurried, can be said to hang. If Patricia Wrightson’s Nargun lives anywhere, it’s there.

‘But this is a home I have been lent, not just a house, and domestic things have entered my head too: the unconscious game of avoiding the broken board under the carpet in the hall floor; the dear little yellow and white enamelled pot, the nest of cast iron pans, the beautifully balanced and weighted vegetable knife, the old scullery sink, the deep, deep bath that retains the water’s heat – and, not least – the BiIlby egg cup from which I ate my Lancefield market free range eggs!’

Thank you, Victoria.

Macropods rule again

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This male Wallaroo never came close to the cabin, despite all the fences coming down. I never saw more than one couple, and usually only one of the pair. The females are paler and smaller, but still stocky and longhaired.

It rained a lot at the Mountain, as this bedraggled little Roo family could attest.

It was the Eastern Redneck Wallabies who made themselves most at home as the netting gradually was rolled out of their way.

But they were happy to share ‘my’ space with the Eastern Grey Kangaroos. The male Roo by the barbeque is on alert, as always when I appeared, but if I came no closer he would stay. The females and joeys were much more relaxed.

Here they are all lying about drying off in the sunshine after a rainy spell, with me well distanced.

Being the only human there, I was allowed to witness many aspects of macropod behaviour.

Like these young male Wallabies practice-boxing. They balanced on their tails as they ’stood’, clasping each other and cuffing faces.

The bravado often fell as they overbalanced and did the same, which would usually end the ‘fight’.

Or their methods of cleaning themselves, like sitting back with their tail stretched out in front between their legs, and carefully defleaing it.

Sometimes the joey would help its mother deal with awkward places for the process, repaying her usual role as cleaner.

Not that the young were slack about their own cleanliness, like cleaning their dainty black paws.

When I say the Wallabies were the most relaxed, I mean it! I simply didn’t count, and often had to step over one to get past. I put up a toddler-type gate at the top of the verandah steps, for fear those long feet would get them into trouble.

While there were plenty of these Wallabies at my place, I never tired of watching them, of photographing them. I especially  loved the mother/joey connections, no matter how old the ‘child’, pouch-fitting or not.

Sunshine Coast snippet

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The Glass House Mountains inland from Nambour on the Queensland Sunshine Coast are spectacular volcanic plugs.  Captain Cook saw them from the sea and thought they resembled the glass furnaces of his native Yorkshire.

But of course they had long been significant to the local Gubbi Gubbi and Jimbaran peoples, and while each peak has its own name, were known collectively as ‘Daki Comon’ or ‘Standing stones’ .

It rained most days of my brief visit, but I was fortunate to be shown a lovely rainforest creek and waterfalls on the private property where I camped.

Being so lush, everything was growing fast and tall, like this fig about to flower.

I was curious about this forest of tall shrubs/small trees, with unfamiliar deeply lobed leaves and prickly stems, but familiar Solanum white flowers and small round fruit. Sure enough they were, but disastrously rampant introduced members of the family, weeds, either Solanum torvum or Solanum chrisotrichum… or both!

One morning we went to a very special place for breakfast, the unique ‘Secrets on the Lake’.  Its cabins and café in the rainforest were overwhelmingly artistic, every piece of timber carved with skiil and whimsy.

The café had great views from its verandah, and great food – at very reasonable prices.

There was not enough time to look at the many carved delights to be spotted, small and large. I’d need to go back; I’d love to stay in one of those cabins.

Secrets indeed!

I found it hard to believe that the owners and creators of this gorgeous place were having trouble selling it, despite the ludicrously low price. At around my age, the couple are in need of a rest; they certainly deserve it!

I’d class ‘Secrets on the Lake’ as a national treasure.

Kangaroos welcome

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It wasn’t only the gentle wallabies who took over my Mountain house yard once I’d let them in. The bigger Eastern Grey Kangaroos eventually used it too. The families became easy around me, but never the males.  When a male stood erect, he was taller than my gate had been.

This one is clearly ready for chasing a female; their penises were always curved like this, although mostly not seen.

They were slower than the wallabies to venture inside my yard, no doubt concerned that the gates might shut them in. The females and young came first.

The kangaroo joeys were as cute as the wallaby ones, and gradually ceased to bother about me, the only human… and pathetically without a tail.

The next drastic step was taking down the netting fence altogether. As you can see, the kikuyu grass was long inside it. That’s a Wallaroo outside; they remained wary and never did venture in far. 

That fence had been a labour to build, and mostly by me, so it was a painful step to dismantle it.

Taking off the netting and rolling it up was a sort of relief and a sort of defeat. I think the roos felt better without it there to possibly hem them in, as even the males seemed more relaxed, preening and cleaning as they usually would.

For me, having an uninterrupted flow down to the small dam allowed better viewing of all the wildlife who came to drink there. Once I saw a female roo even hop in to escape a persistent male! But that was rare.

I felt closer to the wildlife as the man-made barriers came down, while I still regretted the garden dream, the heritage roses…

The price I paid for the overwhelming task and trauma of writing Rich Land, Wasteland was actually incalculable.

Wallaby world

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On my Substack posts I am going through my archives, so I thought I might do the same here, in between trips elsewhere and posts about them.

I urge you to subscribe so you get an email notification when I post; it’s free.

When choosing my favourite photo, it had to be this one.

The mum (an Eastern Redneck, my most common wallaby there) had decided my western mud brick cabin wall, not far from my steps, was her spot.

I was overwhelmed when her joey and I locked eyes one day, as for it I was its first human, likely to be the only human it would ever see in its life here on my isolated mountain wildlife refuge.

So that meant that my theme was going to be wallabies, especially wallaby joeys. I never got over how small the mothers often were, and how big the joeys got and were still carried about in that cosy pouch. And besides, they are so very cute…

I watched them go from hairless and totally pouch-bound to hairy and venturing their front legs out, having the best of both worlds. They would nibble the grass as Mum levered herself along as she grazed.

Yet even when too big to fit in the pouch, they could still drink her milk. The mothers would tolerate this for a while, then cuff the young away. Final weaning steps, I guess.

I wasn’t so keen on some of the adults’ habits.

After I had to let them all into the yard, due to the pressure of writing ‘Rich Land, Wasteland’, they totally trashed my garden.

I’d foolishly thought they’d mainly eat the grass that I no longer had time to mow. Hah!

They didn’t eat the leaves of bulbs, so the naturalised jonquils and daffodils survived.

But it was unexpected that they’d eat strong-smelling plants like lavender. This was a rosemary bush!

Nor did thorns deter them, as they did the same to roses.

But they were a daily treat to watch. They could ignore me as the only human, and be totally natural. They knew it was their world.

How sweet is this young one? Even as it poses in front of a stripped heritage rose bush…

No wonder I miss the real world of my Mountain and the real wildlife with whom I shared it.

Verandah graces

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In any home I’ve had, where possible I have cloaked the verandah in vines as living blinds, to give me shade in Summer, fabulous colour in Autumn and sunshine in Winter. 

At my Mountain it was a mixture of Ornamental Grape/Glory Vine (Vitus vinifera) and white-flowering Wisteria.

Each verandah was also decorated with a 1904 old-fashioned climbing rose, Crepuscule. Its generous repeat flowering of raggedy apricot blossoms even survived the munching possums and taller wallabies. It has a sweet if subtle fragrance, which you can bring indoors, as its small clusters make good cut flowers.

When I left the Mountain, I couldn’t take the rose, but I took cuttings of the Glory Vine and at my next place there were a lot more verandahs for it to cloak, so it took longer, but continued to give beauty in framing the great views there. That four acre place helped me acclimatise to civilisation, but it was too much work for me, being ex-dairy land, not bush.

In the rural town of Wingham, where I was flooded out in 2021, cuttings of that Glory Vine came with me, were planted in the raised beds below, and loved it. Here the vine gave me privacy as well as shade.

The Crepuscule was harder to source, but eventually took its place and began to grace that verandah.

Now, in my final downsizing (apart from the coffin) I planted more Glory Vine cuttings; these ones were from my daughter, who’d kept the vine continuity going. They took, and rapidly did the same job.

In a serendipitous moment, I found a Crepuscule as a solitary bare-rooted cutting, on special in a supermarket. Weird that they even had a heritage rose, weird that I got the last one. It was waiting for me…

Even here on the coast, which is not often rose-friendly, it is happily growing up and along the lattice.

I can’t describe the pleasure I get from seeing my Glory Vine and Crepuscule gracing my latticed verandah externally, and giving me shade, privacy and pleasure when I look from within.

Perhaps I’m a boring gardener, but when you’ve had to move a lot, the continuity of these two plants is a comfort, a nostalgic link that I cherish.

Like my old timber furniture, they have been with me on my life’s journey, through fire and flood.