Solstice

Hiya bloggers. My Auntie recently asked me what the hell is going on with A WineDark Sea, because I haven't posted anything since February fire tower days earlier this year. I'm very aware that this kind of 'sorry I haven't posted for a while' can be the death rattle for many blogs. Not the case here. I've been taking a break because I haven't had many funny or entertaining stories to tell in a season when West Australians have had the driest summer on written record. We've had mass tree deaths and water carting politics going on between towns. On one day, most of the schools in the south west were shut down due to fire risk. During this period, I haven't felt able to contribute in any kind of meaningful way to the blogosphere and it was my Auntie who finally bailed me up about it last week. (Thanks Auntie!)

So, yes I'm going to write about this period. Maybe it's important to document this time of the anthropocene. It's raining now. Sheets of rain have been hammering us all day. The swans have left the inlet ('They didn't even leave a note!' said my Mum).

A Very Towery Christmas

 

On Thursday it rained and at the top of the mountain little pools filled with water. This is my favourite, obviously!

Below is a more treasured local than the reptile in my previous post (eek!). We call these little dinosaurs bobtails or blue tongues. In the eastern states they are called shinglebacks. All appropriate descriptors, really. There are a few babies hanging around as well. Too cute.

 

Below is of a bushfire sixty five kilometres away. This was a particularly nasty one, only a few kilometres away from a town that suffered a terrible wildfire a decade ago. It was started by a machinery fire in a paddock and roared straight into the forest.

Gunsight, reflection, binocs, map and my very cool little weather station - the red gadget is called a Kestrel and takes recordings of wind speed, humidity, temperature etc. Around me the real kestrels whirl and shriek. They have the most acrobatic aerial courtship ever, tumbling over each other in the sky, using the updrafts to race around and around the tower.

Theseus' Car

 Wow ... March 8th was my last post. Well it's fitting that it is now April 8th. Do any of you other bloggers have that sick sense in the stomach for not fulfilling everyone else's requirements? I do, but hell, I've been busy.

Here is me in my rabbit coat with another mammal friend Harry. Harry is one of those friends who I don't see often these days. He waits until the initial excitement and greetings are over, then jumps into my lap for a personal gidday. My dog is thirty times his size but Harry has swag and has always held it over the rottweiler cross. He no cute lapdog, this one is the Black Prince.

In other news, I'm still replacing parts of my car, hence this post's title. The car is now at least twenty years old and I'm coming to the space where I have regular conversations with my mechanic on the Greek Myths. Like, if I replace every part of this car, is it still the same car? Should I replace it with a new car? Covid made prices for new or second hand four wheel drives go through the roof. To maintain an old four wheel drive means pretty much replacing everything. My mechanic is remaining stoic on the subject of Theseus. I did notice however, that his wife keeps a ball of string behind the counter.

This week is the end of fire season for me, so all those kilometres of driving summer gravel roads are coming to pay me back re the yearly fuel allowance. A new turbo charger (the seals were damaged due to corrugations and it's now leaking oil) plus some new shockies (obvs!). In previous years, I've replaced the head, the gearbox, the tyres, a few panels and a roo bar.

Anyway, enough about the car and fuck Theseus' boat. Here's some photos of eagles. Terribly sorry if you associate with Prometheus. You know, livers etc etc.

Birds Reign

Oh this rain is wonderful and such a welcome reprieve to the last week or so.

 

It's been so hot and scary-dry and out-of-control-bushfires are getting called in every day. Evacuation centres set up and the heli-taks are filling up with water on the school oval. A woman is walking around town looking for her cat. Her house burned down and she was staying at the backpackers, she said.

As I drove home today, the rain has created that 'shedding' phenomena that I mentioned about the same time last year - the karris suddenly shed their bark when it rains after a hot spell. The roads were covered in crunchy tendrils of tree skin where ever I drove through a karri forest. These skins look like snakes in that they curve and move on the road. 

Over the hot days, I've put fresh water out for the birds and animals. I never feed them here. My thoughts are that they've survived fine without me for millennia, but I know they just love fresh water. They get so excited when I fill up the old enamelled pot. Yesterday I watched a sacred kingfisher come in for a drink, then a wattler which in keeping with its thug reputation, had a glorious bath for fifteen minutes while the king parrots waited patiently. Red robins, silver eyes, spotted pardolotes, firetail finches and thornbills. Then, early this morning, a Carnaby landed. 

 

This cockatoo seemed to like the general idea of water but was so bloody huge and couldn't work out how to actually bathe in it!

Self medication: mushrooms, crabs, sunshine, poetry.

Happy Winter Solstice folks! We didn't have a family bonfire this year, instead there was major flooding, lightning bringing down power lines, wind at 9 or 10 on the Beaufort scale uprooting whole trees and other extenuating circumstances that involved women without nipples...*

 During this time I've had the worst head cold in years, spent a fair bit of time at the inlet cold, sick and lonely (in isolation basically; no one wants me any where near them), surrounded in butter menthol wrappers and dirty dishes. Yes, and whingy whiny too. So a day or so before the Solstice, when the morning was still and warm with pre-storm languour, I popped a mushroom in my mouth and dragged my sorry carcass down to the beach to sit on a rock, to feel the sun ripple through my chilled spine.

I sat on the same rock where I snapped the crocodile a month or so ago and sipped some hot apple cider vinegar and honey. Over at the boat ramp sat a white ute with fish tubs on the back. Couldn't see the man's boat and then I could - a white rooster tail over the other side of the inlet. As he got closer, I could see that it was Steeleye, his red checked shirt and khaki waders his standard dress code. Dog sat to attention at my feet and whined.

We chatted about the cobbler while he packed the fish. 'Caught three last night', he said as he hefted some stingray wings into the icebox. This is really unusual here and worrying for me as I love wading. 

 

Pelicans began to crowd his boat, growling at each other like kelpies waiting for the scraps. Steeleye gave me a couple of blue manna crabs, rare as well in these parts but the inlet was open for so long last year that all sorts of strange things have been going on - cobbler, stingrays, blue mannas. I even found a marron once, trying to find the fresh and stranded in salt water.

The shroom began to kick in, doing its work on my molars first and spreading to my jaws, behind my eyes. I thanked Steeleye for the crabs and gathered them up by their claws. Walking up to the house, a lightening of my spine and the clicking of crabs at my side, I heard Steeleye's ute rattle along the track, boat trailer thumping behind. Wouldn't be back for a while, he'd said, too many yellow eye mullet and they're only 40 cents a kilo at the moment.

Back in the kitchen I boiled up the crabs to crimson and spread newspaper over the bench. Wasabi and some vinegar in a little bowl. I jointed the crabs' limbs and sucked out my first feast of the season, lifted the carapaces and vinegared away the yellow guts.

I was supposed to drive down south and stay with family that night before the Solstice but I couldn't handle the thought of swagging it on the floor, sick. So instead I fed on fresh crabs, feeling the heady rush of the shroom trip swimming into the fuggy ache of the head cold, listening to Marianne Faithful recite The Lady of Shalott.#

* Not really.

# 'She Walks in Beauty' by Marianne Faithful and Warren Ellis is a wonderful album if you are into either of these two AND the Romantic poets all in one place.

 

Gracias

I've heard about this method before, to lighten the mind. Practising gratitude is not always the easiest thing to do in this very weird place in history. But finding three things every day to be grateful for and actually writing them down is supposed to help rewire our brains into a more positive outlook. I think it works. After a bout of black dog and a relationship break up, I began a daily list a few years ago. I gave up three days later. The science is in that it is good practise but on the first day one of the things I wrote down was:
1. Finding my long lost friend again at Broke Inlet.
Three days later, she died. So, that wasn't a great start to my gratitude program but I'm having another crack at it. The thing is, if you can't immediately find anything to be grateful for, you have to go hunting for them and they can pop into your mind in unexpected and beautiful ways. So here goes my list for today.

1. Bats. I love bats. Bats use echolocation but they are not blind as myths suggest. After a warm day, I sit on the veranda and watch the bats zip around the marri trees hunting summer time insects. Last night (!!!) one landed on me. I felt a soft thud near my collar bone and there was the cutest critter crouching on my jumper. Tinier than a mouse with gossamer wings and bright eyes. I'm so glad I didn't freak out and swat the bat away because I was able to examine it for a full minute before it took off again.

2. Parks and Wildlife ground crew clearing the bushes away from the fire tower steps. 
After last year's controlled burn some of the karri wattles have been getting a bit big for their boots and are growing over the steps. 

Took this photo a year ago so it's not overgrown but until a few days ago, I could not see where I was walking at all. Eek.

 Those concrete steps go all the way up the north facing side of the mountain and thus is where all the venomous snakes in the whole universe go to charge up every morning. They are slow to move during this process and I do like a clear view ahead of me. And. nothing. brushing. against. my. legs. please. So, mucho gracias, guys, for carrying a whipper snipper the whole way to the peak and then clearing the track..

3. Exercise. After a winter spent lying around and then a spring spent lying around with broken ribs, I was getting quite plump and weak. I'm normally lean and strong so it was a shock to realise that I couldn't lift myself onto the back of the ute in one bounce. The horror. After a good five weeks of running up and down the mountain I've lost weight and I'm feeling strong again. I'm happy to report that despite being a peri-menopausal she-wolf, my body is responding in the same way it always has to exercise.

4. Gratuitous entry this one, as only three are required.
Quails. Because native quails. The three chicks I mentioned in a previous post are as big as their mum now and they are becoming quite tame, so long as I make no sudden moves. I've been able to see up close their tawny colours become richer every day. I know when they are coming by their cheepy clucks and the sound of leaves rustling in the understory.

Also, here is Dennis the Doughy Dugite who spent an hour trying to get into the firetower the other day, after mice I suspect. I kept him out with strategic sprays from the metholated spirits bottle. He gave up in disgust eventually. Incidentally, Dennis hangs out a lot where the karri wattles were growing over the steps. He is now a happy surprise, rather than a nasty one.

Things to make smiles again

Apparently, juvenile Snow Owls have such large heads that they find it difficult to sleep while roosting ... or perhaps that is, to stay upright on their roost while asleep. They often fall from their perch high up in a barn and then they go back to sleep on the ground, face down. No really. This is not a dead owl or even a drunk owl pictured above. It's a live, sober baby owl who reckons it's safer sleeping on the ground.

Last week I received a text message from a stranger who'd lost his phone ... and his thumb. I reckon he was having a rather bad day.

 I spent a few fruitless hours thinking about a random person on the continent nursing a reattached thumb and how can you scroll or write text messages with no thumb anyway and what happened? I mean how do you even lose a thumb painting houses? Maybe he lost the phone because his thumb fell off? Was the lack of an opposable digit the reason for his haphazard spelling and grammar? Does the lack of a thumb mean more simeon than sapien? Yeah, I dunno either.

I found this on the interwebs and sent it to some mates, because who knows how to do this thing called life. It just boggles me most days. Quality instructions like the ones below remind me that waking up face-down in a barn or losing both thumb and phone in a single day are events that we are not taught how to navigate, let alone avoid.

 And finally, some things that fuel every day warm fuzzies; a squirrelling pile of tingle wood and a grinning sun dog in the sweet spot.

Shedding season

At night I hear the swans out on the water, chattering. In the mornings I go down to the shore before work. I can see them, black shapes against the silver skin of the inlet. The swans are moulting. Most birds moult a few feathers at a time, which is why you may occasionally see a notch missing from the outstretched wing of an eagle, but swans moult all at once, making them uniquely vulnerable to predators. So, they camp out on the water, twenty four hours a day and their feathers as they shed them line the shore.

As the water goes down from the summer's evaporation, the swan holes are exposed. These pocks are the ones I usually fall into when pushing out the boat. They are formed by the swan's beaks as they forage for cockles on the sea floor.

Now the swans sit out in the middle of the inlet, quietly shedding feathers. The sand bar out there means it's still shallow enough to feed.

Along the track, the tall karris are shedding as well. Their bark folds away in strips and littering the gravel, making millennial mounds of mulch around the base, habitat for critters and feeding the fungi that, in turn, feeds the trees and helps them communicate.

The snakes are moulting, shedding their skins. There is a tiger I encounter often on the mountain steps at around this spot:

The snake is usually powering up in the mornings when I go chugging up the steps but it gets out of the way politely enough. The first time I saw it about two weeks ago, it was dusty looking, almost shabby. Over the last three days I've seen it every day and it is brilliant, shining black with bright yellow stripes. Brand new. The dugites are the same, curling over the granite like a trickle of deep brown oil. I nearly ran one over yesterday. I thought it was dead until it lifted its head to check me out. So shiny and new. I stopped the car a few metres away.

'Okay, so what's going on?' I said to the snake but it still didn't move.

'Would you like me to drive around you then?' I considered which end of the snake, stretched across the road, that I would drive around. Dugites are so doughy, casual as. I still chose its tail end.

So yes, shedding season. Is it all trying to tell me something? Maybe it's not about me at all. Quite likely but interesting to take cues from the bush, even if it is just to notice what's going on.

 

Thar she breaks!

Resolute and the lagoon

Many, many years ago a young cattle man walked the shores of Broke Inlet carrying a saddle on one shoulder and a shotgun over the other. The shore was wide and long, pocked with holes where the swans had been feeding on the underwater cockles just days ago. Undersea ripples shaped like the roof of one’s mouth were still printed into the sand. The man noticed, of course, that the sand bar had been breached, that the water had rushed out to sea after smashing into the bush for six months, but he had future quarrels on his mind and thirty more miles to walk.

He couldn’t have walked that beach 8000 years earlier because the inlet didn’t exist and anyway, he was a white man who didn’t exist either back then. The inlet then was a valley treed with jarrah and karri and alive with birdcall. By 7000 BP (before present) the water came up. I’ve dreamed about this event. I swam through the forest like a seal through kelp. According to oral histories the water came up fast, a cataclysmic happenstance. The inundated trees all died. Cow and Calf became the islands that you can see today, two islands side by side, shining white when the sun hits them.

In those olden

days there was a large plain extending from the main land out

to the White-topped Rocks, about nine miles out from Cape

Chatham. On one occasion two women went far out on the

plain, digging roots. One of the women was heavy with child,

and the other woman had a dog with her. After a while they

looked up, and saw the sea rushing towards them over the great

plain. They both started running towards the high land about

Cape Chatham, but the sea soon overtook them and was up to

their knees. The woman who had the dog picked it up out of the

water and carried it on her shoulders. The woman who was far

advanced in pregnancy could not make much headway, and the

other was heavily handicapped with the weight of the dog. The

sea, getting deeper and deeper, soon overwhelmed them both, and

they were transformed into the White-topped Rocks, in which the

stout woman and the woman carrying the dog can still be seen. *

The inlet had a wider mouth back then and stayed open to the sea through all the seasons. The water was very salty and home to oceanic fish, molluscs and plant life. There was a tide, governed by the moon. Because of the tide and changing times, people built fish traps, beautiful stone wall arcs into the lowest tide. Mullet, bream, herring, pilchers, flathead and leatheries would swim over the walls on the high tide and be trapped there when the tide receded.

Then about 4000 years ago the rain fell less and the lagoon began to close herself against the sea, sealing The Cut with white sand, a place where the plovers began to nest. Because there was no longer a tide, the people began a new form of estuarine fishing, herding fish using brush wood into the traps, now reinforced with built-up sides of wood and bark. This was the new kind of Noongar fishing that early Europeans reported seeing.

The young man carrying a saddle and a gun may have mused about these things or he may have worried instead about his reception when he walked into the Nornalup homestead. Resolute was his father’s favourite horse. They were driving cattle down to the coast to graze for the summer. He and his little brother had tried to ford the Shannon in the wrong spot. He’d lost three heifers and Resolute to the bog at the mouth of the drained inlet, before turning the rest back. He’d had to shoot them as they gasped for air above the mud. The Meadowman patriarch would not be happy.

The drowning of Resolute and three heifers happened in the bog of the Shannon mouth about eighty years ago and today I am watching the water come up every day with the winter rains. One morning, after days of my boat getting swamped and the water pushing into the bush, I’ll wake up to an eerie silence, like the whole world has drawn breath and held it. Swan holes and ripple marks will people a wide and long beach again. I will not have a gun or a saddle on my shoulder but I’ll always be mindful of Resolute and of the drowned forest as the water comes up. Again.

* R. H. Mathews, ‘Folklore Notes from Western Australia’, Folklore, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Sep. 30, 1909), pp. 340-342, p. 341.

(Below are images of the same beach, two days apart.)