Last weekend the inlet looked like this as the wind created a storm surge that smashed into the bush.
And this is the inlet today: See that little grove of melaluca trees? It's the same one!
For weeks the inlet swelled and I was thinking, one more winter storm will do it, and then after another storm, well the next one should break it.
"Never seen her so punishing, so angry," an old resident said, when I sent him a video of the water's influx on Saturday. It was hard to go outside into the intense, oxygenated air. It just felt relentless and the waves were throwing white foam everywhere. Chesapeake road became impassable as the inlet crept through the karri forests and all the river systems backed up. Eventually there was just nowhere for the water to go.
Finally, after days of insane wind and rain, the sand bar to the sea broke open. I woke up on Monday morning, looked out the window and realised we had a beach again. It was an eery feeling after all the drama. A Xenotopia, an in-between space where even the ravens breathed out a more measured Faaark!
Today we headed east along the beach, looking for things, beach combing for plastic and treasure. Peacocky tea tree oil from the forest was still leaching across the freshly exposed undersea.
The trees seemed surprised, caught unawares and exposed after months of being under water. The inlet dropped about 6 feet in as many days. Some of the trees displayed the tattered rosettes of their neighbours' papery bark, wearing them like survivor prizes.
In the photo below, you may see something that looks like a bird's nest. It's not. It's flotsam from the water storm. We looked up in wonder and I measured myself against it, I'm tall but not that tall. "It's like a king tide," said H.
Paper bark trees hammered by the water are the most obvious signs of how high the inlet went. They have the tide lines etched into their skin.
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.
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.
Feb 2. Tower. Time 1507 called in another inlet fire eastern end this time thanks to spotter S. No lightning for two weeks. Weird. Ground crews out and dozer tender. Listened to all radio channels. Crew found an unaccompanied vehicle on the track in to the fire. "Details please". Bombers reported someone sitting on granite at fire's tail. So ... an investigation then. Rangers shut Bib track and huts. Cops involved, found marron nets, chook pellets and a charred cooker with the man.
Feb 3.Tower. No visibility 4s and 5s all round. COLD. Max 18. No smoke in Fire 4. Crew out by 1300. Contained and under control. Fire 4 investigation on Monday.
Feb 4.Tower. No smokes in Fire 4. Met a nice German couple. They both had big teeth and amazing skin. We talked about sharks and bears
Feb 5. Tower. Smokes from Fire 4. Had phone chat with the nearest tower to me. Told him I tried to visit last season but no one was there and that was fine because his tower is freaking terrifying. He agreed which made me wonder why he climbs it everyday. Told him I even brought a thermos of tea and custard pies that day.
Feb 6. Day off. Food shop. Post office. Appt w Silver Chain nurse. Remote area nurse FIFO. Told him my eyeballs were fried from work. He is amazed firetowers still exist. Why not hotspots and AI? I can see smoke an hour or so before it turns up as a hotspot. Early detection. And AI still needs human interpreters ... so far. Bailed on lunch with A. Spider bite making me feel mumpsy and fried eyes. Tired body. Pharmacy on way home for eyedrops.
Feb 7. Tower. Called in fire at Greenrange 150 km away. Thought it was 50 km, then maybe 80. Wildest smoke I've ever seen. Talked to MP. He said that high pressure can even flatten out your retinas (!!!) which makes objects appear closer than they are. Like an eagle. Wild optical illusion. Met tower mouse so not a mardo or honey possum.
Feb 8. Tower. HOT 35 degrees 27% RH. Winds SE 30kph. Smoke coming over from Greenrange fire. Heading along the coast and then inland with sea breeze. Fried eyeballs again. Horizon glare and smoke. Spoke to Y on phone about a writers workshop we are doing. March flies after weeks of none. They still smell sweet like marri flowers on my palm when squashed.
Feb 9. Office. HOT. ML rang, just shooting the breeze. What son even does that? asked S. Read Fire 4 investigation. Sister J got into town for event, doing lightshow. We had ginger beers @ pub after work. Talked about Juliette, death, livers and the Moodjar tree where newly dead go to rest before leaving forever. That moment when they truly leave us like an elastic band snapping. Publican gave us party pies and tomato sauce. A man sitting nearby was wearing satin Christmas themed boxer shorts. Shire worker told me I'd made a friend of the grader driver after I gave him a pear from my lunchbox and a thank you card for grading my road to work.
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.
Psychogeography is a term that emerged in the 1950s and its practice is great for landscape writers and artists: "the effect of a geographical location on the behaviour and emotions of individuals." Until a few years ago, I was completely unaware of the word but had been thinking about the concept for decades. Writing about people of the sea and islands will do that.
"Unfold a map of London, place a glass rim down, anywhere on the map, and draw around its edge. Pick up the map, go out into the city, and walk the circle keeping as close as you can to the curve. Record the experience as you go ... footage as footage." Robert MacFarlane, A Road of One's Own.
In an urban context, this exercise forces a re estimation of our surroundings - what is accessible and what is off limits: fences, the concept of private property, the absoluteness of a stoic brick wall, drains and public thoroughfares. Really, it's a form of re-mapping or even anti-mapping. It breaks us out of the unaware carpark and footpath thinking that we have when heading down to the shops.
The reason why this is coming up for me right now is that the inlet broke its sand bar out to the sea last night. Here is a photo from today and you can check out photos from yesterday in my previous posts.
You can see the footprints from where Selkie was wading out to catch a stick that I'd thrown for her last night, those trees then a pretty reflection on the glassed-off water. We have a beach again!
For the last month, we haven't had a beach. As the inlet filled with river water threading through a system of thousands of square kilometres, places to walk became scarce. We are in the bush here: there are few tracks or roads. The inundation began to feel oppressive. On land, ancient marri trees leaned over us, blocking out the sun and keeping us cold and the solar panels failed us. The bush became more dark and damp. I grew up in sand dune, coastal heath country. We always had an horizon, a big sky. Living in the forest takes some getting used to.
From a person unwittingly writing about the psychogeography of islands, I became a person writing about the psychogeography of inlets and how they are kinda negative images of each other. An inlet is a body of water surrounded by land after all. My feelings come back to the original definition of psychogeography: "the effect of a geographical location on the behaviour and emotions of individuals."
Now this is cool. Last night, I strapped the camera trap to a tree at water level to capture the water as it receded. There were only three night time infra red photos. It was glassed off so the waves didn't trigger the motion sensor. What triggered it was the water rat, a marsupial better known as a Rakali, or in the Noongar language a Ngurju.
The inlet is about to open after all these rains. Here are some 'before' photos that I took today. I'll post the 'after' photos once the sand bar is broken and we have a beach again.
There's a hut in the bush close to my place. It's called Old Smoky because the fireplace doesn't work that well. Old Smoky is on the same property as mine. It's clad in blue asbestos and corrugated iron and the floorboards are made of jarrah timbers. The windows are not glass but plastic blinds. There is no toilet and only the remains of a gas shower.
The whole while I've lived here, a man by the name of Wally stays in Old Smoky on occasion. He always comes over to say hi and let me know that he's in the vicinity. After that, we leave each other alone. He walks out a mullet net in the evenings and sometimes brings me some fillets. He'll bring a load of split jarrah for firewood and stash it in the old rainwater tank, set sideways, like another hut or shelter but to keep warmth and cooking fuel dry, not people..
The commercial fishermen came one year and moved into Old Smoky. Chicky and Brownie found Old Smoky a welcome refuge from camping on beaches in tents. The hut is on private property but they just moved in anyway. I go visit them and sometimes partake in their moonshine. It's rough liquor and the air in the hut is always smoky and close. Brownie chainsmokes tailormades and Chicky is the one who makes the liquor. Chicky and Brownie sleep on swags laid across iron bedstands.
Last year, another man came to stay in Old Smoky. He was confused and alone, a dislocated product of divorce, a lack of meds and the pandemic. I know he'll hate me for saying this, but that is what I saw. He gave me some soap and incense which was a nice gist and told me he was moving into the hut.
So while I was used to Wally and his respectful ways around Old smoky and while I was used to the fishermen turning up when the inlet opened for netting seaon, this Bear Grylls character was a new one. He was trying to do a Broke Inlet version of the TV series Alone except that it also involved asking me to charge his mobile phone on my solar system's inverter and lend him twenty bucks when he ran out of wine.
So. That was a bit weird and I expressed as much to Wally next time he turned up. He was kind of incensed. Not about me having an odd neighbour but that someone was moving into his hut. It's not Wally's hut but Wally was still pissed. After three weeks Bear Grylls gave up on his plan of living off the land and moved back to Albany. On my trips to the city I still occasionally see him walking up the main street in his camo gear and DriZaBone..
Then the fishermen moved in again. They burnt all of Wally's split jarrah, that load of wood Wally had so covetously collected and stashed. They burnt it in the dodgey fireplace Old Smoky is famous for, over the whole netting season. Wally came back in the spring to find all his firewood gone. So now was he doubly pissed. Not only have people been using his hut (which he does not own) but they've taken all of his fucking firewood! (Fair call)
Wally fortifies the door and puts a padlock on Old Smoky. He plants some tomatos, chillies and a lemon tree over the mullet frames he's buried. This is a territorial war,verified by vegetables. I know I've gone from past tense to present tense but shit is getting real now folks. Bear with me.
Today, the fishermen returned and Wally was waiting for them. He knew they'd be here on the first of May and he moved his whole famility into Old Smoky for two weeks. Brownie and Chicky came up from the beach to see me, after they'd launched the boat and moored it in the inlet. 'Wally's in Old Smoky?' Chicky asked me.
'Yes,' I said. 'Would you like to borrow my tent?'
This morning, driving to work, I nearly got cleaned up by another four wheel drive. The exodus out of this holiday town after the Easter long weekend is always pretty hectic and there can be some bad behaviour on the highway. This morning, a man towing his boat was temporarily inconvenienced by some boomers crawling up a long hill with their caravan. He lost his patience and tried over-taking the caravan on double white lines. Blind corner.
I came around said blind corner and this guy towing the boat was right there. It was looking like a head-on crash. He had nowhere to go and I had nowhere to go except the soft gravel shoulder, which I took to at about 90 kilometres per hour. Then he threw out an anchor, slipped back in behind the caravan again and gave me a cheery wave. The two cars continued, one towing a caravan, the other a boat, heading home from the holiday town.
I had to stop the car and take a few minutes to collect myself. That wave was weird. He'd nearly killed several people ... and he just fucking waves?
I was a bit late to work and still rattled when I got there. Now that the fire season is drawing to a close, one of my other jobs is in a place called The Valley of the Giants. The Giants is in reference to the Tingle trees, three kinds of Eucalypt that only grow in this area. Tingles have a character all to their own amongst the Karris and Marris. Remember the Ents from Lord of the Rings? These trees are like Ents. They are warty and wizened and live for centuries. You can just imagine them scooping up doomed warriors and marching them to safety. Except the Tingles themselves are in trouble, due to a changing climate and declining rainfall. They are remnant citizens from another era.
The sky walk is a steel structure based on suspension bridge engineering which takes tourists through the canopies of these trees. The sky walk sways and breathes as you walk along it. At 40 metres above the forest floor with seemingly little between yourself and certain death, it can sometimes feel like your body is screaming no no no!
One of my favourite jobs is not in the gift shop but up on pylon 2, the second highest pylon at about 38 metres. At that height, I'm in the canopy. Trees are breathing all around me. It's almost pure oxygen. It smells amazing.
Today, after my near-fatal on the roads, I got up there and watched the wind rip across the top of the trees. The thinner Yellow Tingles swayed and swirled. Pylon 2 swayed too. The stoic Red Tingles stayed stoic. It began to rain and then it began to hail! Bright little buckshots of ice bounced on the checkerplate steel, the air electrified with nitrogen. I had my overcoat and umbrella and watched as tourists straggled towards me, hailstones bouncing off green umbrellas and 3 dollar rain ponchos, those beautiful trees beside me, just breathing out oxygen.
The path winding between granite and a yellow tingle tree on the way to the fire tower. It's morning and white-breasted robins hop from karri hazel limbs ahead, to lead me away from their chicks.
At the summit, I wipe sweat from my face (it's a decent climb), wind up the shutters and check out the view. A few small blue smokes rising in columns from the last burn. That red device hanging over the gunsight is amazing for weather recording - something we do every hour.
There's some odd critters up here, probably due to the altitude. People from anywhere other than Western Australia will tell me that "this isn't a mountain, it's just a hill!" but being closer to the sky than most country around here, there is definitely a change in habitat. A girl named this stick insect Frank. Frank has two other mates, just hanging in the tower.
... some kind of lady bird I never see anywhere but here, roosting on Quokka poo near the stairs.
... a king skink always gives me a fright on the steps!
... and a beautiful lacewing ...
And then there are the eagles, Waarlitch or Wedgetail Eagles. I always know they are on their way when the other birds down by the river start screeching. "Waarlitch! Warlitch!"
If you hang around in one place for long enough, you see some amazing stuff.It's a waiting game ... bushfires, critters and rainbows.
Bit pleased with myself here in the photo above. The bushfire is out on the horizon. I called it in at 50 kilometres from the fire tower and got it within 100 metres, after its position was confirmed by the spotter pilot. Judging distance is difficult out in the flatlands to the north, with few landmarks such as hills, paddocks or mobile phone towers.
I listen. Sometimes it's classical music on the FM channel, sometimes podcasts or audio books. I listen to the spotter pilots from other districts on the UHF or turn on Spotify to find Johnny Cash. Reading makes my eyes tired and takes them from where they should be - the horizon.
We are only allowed to work four days straight and I know why. After four days my eyes are sore and my brain is fried. Mostly, my tower partner tries to avoid four straight days on the roster. Up here too long, we begin to make mistakes and feel a bit crazy. It's a weird combination of being on high alert all day and bored at the same time. A day off to reset and rest is important, especially when both of us work other roles during the fire season.
So, after four days, it's a blessing to head down to the beach at my house and watch the swans fly east in the evening, sit in the yellow sand with the hound and watch the sunset.
The novel Earth Abides by George R. Stewart is supposedly in the genre of science fiction. It's one of those books that during most recent pandemic times and climate crises was touted by bookshops to move from "science fiction to the Australiana section". The narrator Ish is a young geographer who heads up into the mountains near his native San Francisco on a field trip to research his PhD. Earth Abides was published in 1949, so not long after a real, apocalyptic world event and like Camus' The Plague, is considered a great existential novel of its time.
Ish's name could derive from Ishmael, the sole survivor of the Perquod's encounter with the great white whale, or perhaps from an Indigenous American man called Ishi who walked into Western, urban society after his tribal society was vanquished by disease and colonisation.
I've been listening to the audio version of Earth Abides after reading Mike Davis' Dead Cities and Other Tales. Apocalyptic fiction is so good for long drives but my love for this genre has history. What would you do/be/become as one of the last humans on Earth? I mean really, I love this shit. Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Attwood, John Wyndham, Jim Crace and H.G. Wells combined philosophy, poetry, ecology and wholly sensible thoughts to create their dark visions of our humanitarian future.
In Earth Abides, Ish emerges from the wilderness after having suffered a rattlesnake bite. He's confused about whether the snake venom also caused a weird illness, with his rashes and lesions and a high temperature. The electricity and water are still on at the general store when he gets there but nobody's home. He leaves a note, promising to pay back the fuel bill. Gradually he realises the extent of the plague. There are moments of Ish moving from civilised to feral when he breaks the window of a newsagency to read the last papers published (seven days previous 'Situation Acute!!!') to when he requisitions a police officer's motorcycle.
There are no zombies in Earth Abides and I do thank Stewart for this. Instead there are some pretty mediocre survivors: a drunk with haunted eyes, a grifting white couple you'd normally place on the outskirts of a crack den and a mad hoarder who has stashed 24 copies of the same magazine edition, just in case. Ish wonders ... did any of the good, any of the useful people survive? In general, it seems that humanity has been cleanly, almost surgically excised from the world.
One of the most poignant parts of the novel for me were reading how nature took back the cities. Cities and indeed dwellings take constant maintenance to keep nature at bay. My own house looks like Halloween right now because I like to let the daddy long leg spiders take care of the bush flies. (Caveat, I do vacuum up the poor buggers twice a year). In Stewart's scenario, when the culverts aren't cleared and the weeds aren't sprayed, Highway 66 devolves, or evolves, into sand and then trees.
This is fascinating! "This grandly suspended, inorganic metropolis," wrote Earnest Bloch, "must defend itself daily, hourly, against the elements, as though against an enemy invasion."
In 1996, New Scientist writers called upon ecologists and other experts to try and qualify how quickly nature would take over cities, once humans were removed.
"Within five years, New Scientist found, weeds would indeed conquer the open spaces, pathways and cracks of the city ..." The buddleia, sweet lil butterly bush, was found to be the biggest bad ass of bad asses in this whole article.
So Buddleias are able to grow through concrete to source nutrients and water (don't plant them near your septic tank folks) and are basically touted as the plant that will thrive and dismantle our infrastructure, destroying our tallest buildings and roads. THE BUDDLEIA WILL TAKE YOUR SOCIETY DOWN. When humans don't have enough energy or workforce to keep them at bay, those motherfucker buddleias will rule.
Once again - I just love this shit. In the end (?) Ish creates a society of survivors and it's always fraught with its own existential questions. Given the era of writing (1940s) he sprays himself with DDT to get rid of fleas, speaks of his marriage partner as 'fulsome' or 'fertile looking' and engages in all the racial dynamics of the time, which is odd but ... okay George..
I fell asleep several times listening to the audio book, waking to hear that ants had died out because they didn't have as many cadavers to feed on, fell asleep, woke up to when the big cats predated upon the small house dogs, fell asleep, woke up at dawn thinking, 'This is an okay day, today.' Had some strange, lucid dreams in the interim.
In the morning, my dog licked my spare hand as I pushed the fruit bread decidedly into the toaster and the electric kettle bubbled to a shut behind me.
GR Stewart, Earth Abides, Random House, 1949
Mike Davis, Dead Cities and other tales, New York, 2002.
On my knees before the hearth, it's a nightly ritual of prayer and matches. I like to arrange the kindling in a pyramidded grid over the cube of firelighter. 'That's cheating,' a friend said to me once. A lazy critique, since I was the one holding the axe and the match. I could use newspaper, I guess, but having to twice light a fireplace as the sun goes down sets up a superstitious dread in me. The spack and cackle of a happy fire bodes well for an evening.
The swans have left for the inland paddocks. This year there were hundreds of them, summering out in the inlet. All night I could hear them chatting to each other. Now there is the owlet nightjar, squawking her coordinates as she begins the hunt. Driving to and from work, the sun is always low and bright, strobing between the trees, blinding me suddenly on the hairpin bends through the forest.
Selkie's best mate Sexy Rexy is back. His humans are over at the bush camp behind my house. He's part dingo and lives in a rubbish bin - just like Oscar the Grouch but much nicer. I do love this dog with his black points and dingo habits but damn does he have to piss on everything? Even my mosquito net is not immune. He turns up at daybreak and my outstretched arm tells him to get out. So he does ... but not before Selkie slinks off after him and they disappear for hours. I'd love to put a go pro on her collar to find out their travels.
The commercial fishers are back with the beginning of the inlet season. And some old surfer/yachties camped in the hollow just near my place. There's me - circling around the idea of being alone, circling, circling and then finally settling into my nest like a dog - and then sitting around a campfire with people who are happy to tell me stories.
A prescribed burn across the inlet was going on and the evening opened with clear skies and glassed off blood red water, a true wine-dark sea of fire and light. One of the commercials gave us some flounder and we cooked them up. Fell upon them like kelpies, crunched through the crispy skins to the sweet meat, sucking white flesh from robust rib bones. I haven't eaten flounder for an age.
Okay so this view to the south is where all the shit gets real for humans re bushfires. If you've been following, West, North and East of the firetower are largely national park areas with little or no people living in the area. To the south of the firetower however are roads, farms, towns and primary real estate.
Because there are so many more people living or moving in this area, our tower job is kinda obsolete. We will spot, plot, report and then forget all smokes we see to the south. We know heaps of people and the brigades will be on it already. But I've spotted three or four bushfires in the north so far this week and they haven;t been half so sexy in the media.
This could be my favourite drawing and outlook from the fire tower, because of the profiles of the hills. There are some low lands directly below the mountain which are pretty interesting too, full of yorgum and moodjar trees in flower. Today, as every day, if you wait for long enough in the same place, nature will throw on an event.
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