The generator is whirring outside tonight. I say whirring, maybe it is thumping. Anyway, the generator is a presence, a petrol-induced entity who keeps the lights and internet on. My batteries connected to the solar panels are giving me ambivalent signals right now. Living off grid is a constant mind-state of thinking about power sources.
Last week a young woman contacted me. 'Hi Sarah, I'd like to interview you about your part in the Women's Work project. Could we set up a time for me to film you talking about this project?'
As always, I was driving between towns. Someone once told me I have a house in Gemini, which means I live in two houses and this is so true. I replied, stuck in road works world between two towns, 'Coming into town. Can we meet at Lawley Park?'
There were several vehicles at Lawley Park when I turned up. It was lunch time, so some council workers stretched by their truck, a stray Winnebago lurched between the big colonial trees and there was that guy in a lime green Holden commodore. The driver of a crimson people mover looked like she just needed to get away from her kids.
Rachel from the television news network got out of her white SUV and started setting up tripods, checking her camera and testing the audio. From my old lady point of view, she looked like she was about 11 but she was actually a pretty competent woman in her 20s. She interviewed me for about fifteen minutes, went back to work, did the editing and production work herself and her story was on the news by 5.30 pm.
I'm bringing up this scene because I have spent several months creating a simple audio visual story to contribute to the Women in Media, Wimmin's Work project. The State Library asked me to contribute a story and I was like, 'Of course, yes! I can do audio work.' (ummm). After months of quite intense sessions on my own with head phones and still learning the lingo, I came up with this:
I mean - it took me months! And Rachel from Channel 7 did much the same thing in about three hours. I'm now in awe of people who can put together a story so fast. Anyway ... enjoy my foray into AV. It's been a trip. If you would like to see other stories from the same project, go here:
This is a poem by Dorothy Hewett, an esteemed Western Australian poet with legendary status in these parts.
THE VALLEY OF THE GIANTS
In the burnt-out trunk in the karri forest myself my little sister hand in hand one dark one fair one bonnetted one with a nimbus of platinum hair like lost children out of a gothic tale behind us his akubra hatted head sprouting unseen antlers our father the wood demon growing out of a tree snapped up by a box brownie the 60 year old negative exposed like a parable the dark father the dark child subdued and powerful the blonde in her white dress blazing into the light transitory as a cabbage moth alighting for an instant in the forest
those judging figures orchestrate the scene rising out of the litter on the forest floor implacable as horned owls the giant tree's fallen down the children grown the tragic rotting order overthrown.
I think it was my last day on firetower today and it was kinda boring and long. Low visability, no smokes and the spotter planes returning early because the clouds were covering the south. Fires to the west had died down due to the rains.
At the same time, permit burns had opened to the north east and so we were supposed to look out for them!
On my morning climb, the snake has gone but there is a feral pig that snorts in the bush as I pass it by. It is digging up leaf litter along the pathway. At one stage of my climb, this pig has dug a ditch and rolled around in it. People think that Australian feral pigs are like gigantic razorbacks but they are actually smaller than your average kelpie ... little pigs. They are kinda cute but they can really mess with country.
I hear the pigs snorting in the mornings as I walk up the mountain, the crashes as they run away from me through the forest, and then see their workings on the pathway where they have rooted around the leaf litter for bugs and roots.
So today, I climbed the mountain sans tiger snake, as the little pig jumped away from me into the forest. The clouds clung to the coast and I knew it was my last day on the tower for the season. The spotter pilot called balese on the weather coming in from the south. "Heading home to the north," she said.
We see some pretty amazing things when up in the firetower. Wedge tail eagles hunting, floating around, never flapping their wings, just tipping their wings to catch the updraft, sometimes a notch missing on their wings from a moulted feather, fighting the siblings in spectacular airborne dogfights. Little brown birds on the summit. Peregrine falcons catching butterflies. An eagle with tree's twigs in its talons. Ink black skinks wriggling up to the tomato leftovers I throw out the window. A vertical rainbow. The light spearing through the clouds to highlight a certain paddock alone in the forest..The strangest insects I've ever seen.
Today, I climbed the mountain to the fire tower and got to the spot where a tiger snake lies basking every morning. It is always lying in the leaves against a massive wall of granite, just powering up with early sunlight. Every. Fucking.Day. Stretched out in the mornings, coiled in the afternoon, it is a resident who eyes me as I pass through ancient lace curtains.
'You can't see me, right? Look again!"
Despite my recent snake handling course, understanding the critters a bit better and a handy compression bandage in my backpack, I still stall at this point of the climb. If I had one of those watches, pretty sure I'd see my heart rate peaking out right about the moment I round the corner on the last bit of pathway before the stairs begin.
This morning, the tiger was nowhere to be seen. This was worrying, because I like to know where it is and not get taken by surprise. But it is St Patrick's Day after all.
Me: Hey, Happy Saint Patrick's Day! Let's get bent on green beer!
My snake mate: Yeah um. Maybe not today.
Me: But it's so great. We'll do Irish dancing and ...
My snake mate: yeah ... nah.
Me: Oh, oh man I'm so sorry. I forgot.
My snake mate: It's alright man. I love you right? But St Pats is never a good day for me.
So today, we cautiously avoided each other, this human and this snake. Tonight I collected some gaiters from my Mum's place. Mum is all for preventative measures (super sensible!) and one of them, when I expressed my worries about this particular tiger snake, was "get some gaiters so you feel better about climbing the mountain."
There's a man we call Johnny Walker because he walks the highway everyday into the little town. He swings his arms as he walks, always dressed the same; dark clothing, a backpack and peaked cap. He lives in the forest some where only he knows, ten kilometres or so from the shops. His living in a tent in an unknown location tends to stress the authorities out a bit but the general consensus is that he is better off here than on the streets of Perth.
It was a weird day in the fire tower yesterday. Smoke from the bushfires stymied any chance of me spotting a new one. Once the southerly came in and cleared some of the smoke, low cloud descended and I could only see for about twenty kilometres. A long, frustrating day!
As the sun slid down, I went into town for supplies and saw John, striding towards me, waving me down. We always stop to have a chat, quick snippets of life, how we are feeling today. John doesn't do eye contact but once that is comfortably established, he is a great conversationalist.
'Hey lovely Sarah!' John said. 'Would you like a sausage roll? Got a heap half price from the servo.' He brandished a few brown paper bags at me.
'It's a long way to the top, John, so yes please,' I said and he handed me a bag with a sausage roll and a bonus cheddar kranski.
On the Broke track, the long gravel road through the karri forests to my home, I was again stymied. (Yes, it's a stymie kinda day and also I like that word. It's almost onomatopoeic.Try saying it slowly, out loud.)
Karri trees drop their enormous limbs without warning, often when warm weather suddenly cools and the resins in their joints contract. This one happened probably only an hour or so before I got there. The scene was a mess, from twigs and leaves to logs half a metre wide. It was six o'clock. Long day and all I wanted to do was get home.
What beekeepers call the 'karri flow' is on at the moment. It's a phenomena that happens every seven or eight years. The trees burst into bloom and the smell is amazing, like the air is laden with honey and memory. Normally you can't see the flowers because they are sixty metres above us but as I started pulling away branches, the source of that scent became obvious. One more leafy and perfumed branch later, I uncovered a crime scene: Three fluffy chicks lay scattered about what was once their roost.
By then, I'd already been on the phone to my boss about the tree. It is a fire road after all and crew are using it every day when heading out to the bush fire. Plus, yeah, I just wanted to get home and I couldn't move those logs myself. The problem was that it was six thirty on a Friday afternoon and all the shire roads mob were going into relaxation or limp mode. It seemed intractable.
'But I have chicks!' I said on the phone and like a movie, the three chicks began to recover from their momentous fall and start chirping and moving about. 'Oh my God, they are alive!'
'Okay, keep them warm and when you get home, give them some sugar water,' my boss said. So ... how do I get home with a recalcitrant karri limb playing door bitch? Boss pulled some strings and an hour later, headlights threaded through the trees as one of the fire crew on stand by turned up with a chainsaw and towing chain.
It was quite dark by the time we'd finished piling the branches onto the sides of the road. I beckoned the fire fighter over to the tail lights of his truck. 'Check this out,' I said, holding the brown paper bag.
'It's a ... sausage roll?' He asked, peering into the bag. 'What am I looking at? A sausage roll?'
'Look closer, there's three little chicks in there.'
He did and said, 'Wow! Where did you find them?' When I showed him the spot where these fledglings had fallen to earth, he said, 'Good spot! I guess sausage rolls are not part of their normal diet. Mixing it up a bit are you?'
'Boss told me to keep them warm. This *on special and then donated* sausage roll is still sort of warm, so I thought it might be a nice place for them.'
Two of the chicks died overnight. The violent crashing down of their home was just too much. But the third (the one in my hand) cheeped and moved about on the hot water bottle and gave out a tenacious 'I will survive' vibe. I fed it lemon barley cordial from a pipette and my dog hovered about, no doubt anxious about hierarchical matters.
Today, I was rained off the tower which was quite excellent, given the bushfires, and drove seventy kilometres to meet a wild bird carer. We met in the car park of a roadhouse and I handed over the tiny featherless chick to her. 'It's pooing! That's a good sign,' she said. The last I've heard is that the little trauma baby had a good feed and is going well.
So, next time I see Johnny Walker, I'll tell him that he did good by giving me that brown paper bag with the warmish sausage roll inside. It may well have saved a life.
There is a massive bush fire prowling around the forests about 20 kilometres to the west of me. Every day, conditions change according to the wind direction or rain. Large tracts of karri, marri and jarrah country are in the conflagration and occasionally, while on tower, I'll see some black smoke go up, which usually means tea tree or some other kind of melaluca. I can smell the track of the fire in the smoke, as it moves through grass trees, karri forests and peat swamps. Fragrant, warm, dusty, acrid.
All roads into the area have been closed and Fire and Emergency Services have ordered traffic control people to block the roads with their cars.Traffic control do twelve hour shifts from 5 to 5, sitting in their cars all night or all day. The night before last, a traffic control crew were evacuated from the fire ground when the wind changed.
This whole experience has changed my thinking about traffic control: they are pretty much first responders but in a boring sense. Sitting in a car for twelve hours. No internet or phone range. Nothing to do but deter randoms from the fire ground.
This is a photo from one of those guys who saw the moon emerge from the clouds, with the lights from his truck illuminating the foreground.
In the massive old grandmother marri trees who loom over my house, a night heron roosts and feeds. They are shy birds and will often explode from the tree above my head as I walk underneath. The sensation can be alarming - like disturbing a colony of fruit bats in the far north - there is a mad flapping of wings and calls that sound like a child's shriek.
Some years, I don't see them. But it's always weird to see a large water bird roosting in a tree, something surreal in the arboreal. They have feathers a distinct shade of cappuccino froth and a water bird's delicate, long, curved beak and this year there are many night herons.
Today I was wandering about and noticed the white bird droppings in the marri litter near the chopping block. And a flash of bright blue, some masticated shellfish. I looked up (didn't get a shit in the eye) and saw the night heron. The blue was the detritus of her meal. The claws and skulls of yabbies lay on the ground like a grotto graveyard. The leftovers from a day's feed, after spending the night hunting in the waters of the inlet.
