Mist rises from the mountains opposite as morning light grows stronger. It reveals light snow has fallen overnight up there at 5000 feet.
That’s in the wilderness area, so only the wallabies will be marking the snowfall with their prints.
But the sun is rising too, and the mist begins to glow, tinged with rose as the long low rays penetrate it.
The snow will melt during the day; the brief glimpses I get are rewards for the cold morning, and a reminder that I’m not in Sydney!
The cleared slope was a fairly uniformly well-grazed green. Except for a spot of orange today.
I walked over to see what it was and found a small cluster of coral fungi blooming fleshily all by itself in the middle of nowhere.
A species of Ramaria, it would seem, or else paprika cauliflower cheese made from a rather spindly cauli.
Back home another incongruous splash of orange drew me to the orchard, to the sawn-off base of a self-sown avocado tree who’d had 10 years to prove it could fruit, and didn’t, meanwhile shading my vegie patch.
It was ringed with tough orange frilly fans, while others were elegantly striped, in less garish cream and grey and brown. I think it’s Trametes versicolor.
On top of the stump was a cluster of funny little greenish-grey nubs, like lost teeth. What they are I cannot imagine!
Thanks to Margie Jenkin for her review of The Woman on the Mountain in the latest edition of Island, Tasmania’s justly famous magazine of arts and literature.
A good review is always gratifying, but this is the best of the lot by a long way and it makes the hard work of writing worthwhile.
Margie Jenkin is another mountain woman: she lives on Mount Wellington, the huge, brooding dolerite massif that dominates the landscape around Hobart. And she works as a ranger on the Maria Island National Park off the south-east coast of Tasmania.
There couldn’t have been a better choice of reviewer: her studies at the University of Tasmania’s School of Geography and Environmental Studies included an Honours thesis exploring sense of place through the stories of Tasmanian lighthouse-keepers and their families — so she was very much in tune with my own feelings about the the importance of place in our physical and emotional lives.
I can’t resist a couple of quotes from her sensitive and beautifully written review:
“Munro’s writing emanates strength and courage, and thoughtfulness for tomorrow. Reading her words, you are urged to reconnect with home to nurture a sense of care…”
“A complete treat, this book is daring and heroic. Munro’s narrative provides the habitat to re-visit your own ideologies and unfulfilled dreams. She reminds you that it is never too late, but warns that you must plant your seedlings soon to see them grow in your lifetime.”
You can read the full review in Island No. 113, out now, and I urge you to subscribe if you can — our literary magazines deserve everyone’s support, so visit the Island website now.
Or you can download the review as a PDF here,
My thanks to Margie once again and to Island’s editor Gina Mercer for permission to re-publish the review.
This may not sound like much action, but when there’s frost on the tents and no hot showers for six days (10-15 July) – it is suffering for the cause.
Held in Newcastle, the world’s largest coal port, the national Climate Camp drew hundreds of committed environmental activists, mostly young, since it followed the Students for Sustainability conference. But there were enough greyheads for me to feel at home when I joined them for three days.
With workshops and discussion groups, the whole event was astonishingly well-organised and run by volunteers. Great vats of great vegan food were prepared to feed the hundreds. I earned a blister from my stints there, chopping pumpkin mostly.
And there was action. On the Saturday hundreds more concerned people joined us. We crouched down to form a human sign – ‘Cut carbon — now or never’ and a human ticking clock, which caused us to leap up and ‘explode’ over the oval at ‘midnight’. If you weren’t in the helicopter it wasn’t much of a photo opportunity, except for the rear end of the person in front!
On Sunday we had over 1000 people of all ages and backgrounds turn up to walk to the coal terminal and perhaps stop the coal trains, to protest against coal’s role in fuelling climate change.
The rally included way-out costumes, clowns, drummers, the Radical Cheerleaders, mums pushing strollers, kids holding hands – and knee-challenged grannies like me. There would have been a lot of high bright beseeching banners but the police banned their poles.
My block has lots of old stringybark trees, survivors of many fires, firmly grounded with their thick trunks and spreading roots.
From their wrinkled ankles to their splayed feet, they look like planted elephants.
But then, if you’re a Tolkien fan, tell me how many toes an Ent has?
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this ancient shook the forest litter off its feet and headed up the hill.
You may have heard the odd expression, ‘the common or garden variety’.
It’s used pejoratively, meaning nothing special.
I find this odd because my small vegetable and herb garden produces some of my most beautiful flowers in the course of their ‘common or garden’ duties of feeding me.
Like the Roi de Carouby snow pea, who drapes my netting fence with softly spotted green leaves and suspends stunning two-toned blooms in pink and burgundy, which turn into large and deliciously crisp peas.
They almost never make it to my table because I eat them as I see them, reluctantly leaving a few to grow fatly podded for seed for next season.
Or how about the borage plants, with their exquisitely shaped and detailed flowers — blue and burgundy petals and purplish-black stamens.
The flowers hang like space age lanterns below their clusters of exotic hairy buds.
The crinkled borage leaves are hairy too, and both flowers and leaves smell like cucumber.
I use the flower petals in salads and add just a few leaves to juices, as a tonic, but many claims are made for this herb, such as increasing milk flow in nursing mothers, or to give courage in battle. I could use the latter at times!
But I wouldn’t care if it was good for nothing but beauty, as I never plant annual flowers and the generous borage self-sows every year.
When a tree dies it becomes something else here: a home, for birds if big enough, and for insects, fungi and lichens.
Some seem more appealing to the latter than others, like this fantastically decorated tree.
It stood out amongst the tree trunks of the forest, even in the mist. And this was on north-western side of the trunk, not the south, as I’ve always been told they prefer.
Walking inside a cloud makes for mystery, not clarity. At 3000 feet up, I get a lot of cloud visits.
My large double dam, slowly being throttled by reeds, was floating in the filtered light of thin cloud as I walked around it.
Through the reeds I spotted a pair of wood ducks. I crept towards them, but as usual they sensed me coming, and headed off into the mist.
This shy and very elegant native duck is my most common water visitor.
The male has less patterning on his body and a chestnut brown head, and if you look carefully at the peek shot of them amongst the reeds, you can see the black strip of mane at the back of his head – he is sometimes called a Maned Wood Duck.
The female is a softly spotted grey, with white stripes across her brown head, although you can’t see that in these misty pics.
Until they are grown up, the young ones of both sexes look like their mum.
This month I’m heading back down to the cultural haven of Eltham in Victoria.
The Eltham Bookshop is presenting their annual New Voices Festival and I’ve been invited to take part.
My panel session, ‘A cat among the pigeons,’ chaired by Professor Catherine Cole of RMIT’s School of Creative Media, is at 1.30-3.00 pm on Sunday 20th July.
Bookings essential: email the Eltham Bookshop or download the full programme here: new-voices-2008
I’ll also be speaking at Belgrave Library at 12.30 on Thursday 24th.
I never cease to be amazed by the apparently infinite variety of fungi here. I keep discovering ones that I’ve never seen before, like this colony of banded and frilly bonnets in Indian red and brown.
Mostly quite small, about 35mm diameter, they were growing on a dead branch on a live stringybark tree, almost spiralling up its length.
Yes, I’ve looked them up and no, I couldn’t find out just what they are.
I’m hoping one of my website visitors will tell me their name, but I guess the fungi experts keep discovering new ones too.
As I walk through my mountain forests I often come across impressive examples of the past power of geological events. I also often see things that I can’t explain.
This mighty rock rests upright, halfway up the sides of one of my spring gullies. It is too imperious to be ‘decorated’ with moss as lesser rocks are, mainly restricting it to its feet.
But how did that small separate rock get up there on its top? And stay there?
It has sat there, like a wren on an elephant’s head, for the thirty years I’ve been here.
Whenever I fluke a morning sky like this, my day starts well.
No wonder artists are inspired by nature!
Even if, like me, you’re not a fan of the colour pink on handbags or cars or bedroom walls, when you see the absolute delicacy of the pink hues in a sunrise sky — you’d have to agree our colourists have gone wrong in their translation from the original.
