Night Shift

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.

Photo by Beer Garden Philosopher

 

 

Winter solstice part 3

 

They drove through the night to Ellis Creek Road. Jayden looked over to Matt as he was driving. They turned into an orange gravel road. It was jarrah forest, deep and funky with fungi. He could smell the damp settling in for the night after a day’s meagre sunlight. ‘Close now, yeah?’ He asked Matt. The forest was crowding them now. Jayden could feel it closing around the car. Forget Matt’s bikie family, the trees were enough. They stopped the car at the pine plantation growing in the middle of the jarrah forest.

‘This is the spot,’ said Matt.

‘Hey, we’ve got these,’ Jayden handed Matt an MDMA tab. ‘Special occasion. Let’s go picking.’ The two young men stuffed some beers, rollie papers, water and plastic bags into their backpacks. Jayden locked his car and they walked into the pine forest.

The moon was fully over the trees now and making shadows of them. Their boots trod quiet upon the pine needles. Snuffling of roosting cockatoos and the scampering of critters up trees. A bird flew overhead and screeched at four points of the compass. ‘Owlet nightjar,’ said Jayden. ‘How do you know that shit?’ Said Matt. Jayden couldn’t explain that. Too many references to his Mum’s knowledge would be getting weird now.

‘Do you think anyone’s out here?’ said Matt. ‘… oh hey hey here we go, Jay!’ Matt’s whole dank demeanour changed into a capering Catweasle. In the groove of the trees, he shone his phone torch on a grove of tiny mushrooms. They poked out of the pine needles like tiny fists, all yellowy and nippled in their centres.

As they both stared at the psilocybin mushrooms, Jayden felt his trip coming on. It was almost as though by looking at them, they communicated their properties to him. He bent down to one of them and tapped its cap to loosen the spores into the earth before he picked it. His back teeth began thrumming as the MDMA kicked in. He closed his fingers around the stem of the mushroom. He could feel the muscles in his crouch and the moon’s benevolence. He knew the owlet nightjar was watching him. His balls were tingling and the forest was saying, ‘Best leave now, son!’ The mushroom screamed as he broke it.

Jayden picked just one magic mushroom. The noise of his plastic bag in the moonlight, as he dragged it out of his backpack and put the mushroom inside, felt deafening. Matt was running between channels of pine trees and shouting in a kind of whisper. ‘Oh my God, Jay, Jay! There’s fucking heaps of them.’

Then Jayden saw lights and he wasn’t sure if the lights were behind his own eyes or in front of them. But then Matt was running towards him, his backpack jogging on his back and a white plastic shopping bag swinging to one side. ‘Turn off your light man,’ he said. ‘Got plenty anyway. Turn off your light.’

Matt was on his own trip, Jayden realised. But turning off their phone torches was probably a good idea. They walked together up a slope in the pine plantation until they got to a peak where they could see down to a water reservoir.

Jayden tried. ‘You know Matt, we’ve been mates since like forever.’

The full moon lit up the water.

‘What the fuck,’ Matt said. ‘Dad killed someone. He’s going to jail, Jay. He killed someone.’ Matt began to weep.

Jayden put his arm around his friend’s shoulders. ‘Mum will really like these shrooms too,’ he said and then remembered that night out poaching, when he felt scared and small and cold and his Mum was ranting about poetry or something and about the end of the world.

 

 

 

 

Winter Solstice Part 1

 

Three hours out of the city and the sun sitting low behind them, Jayden and Matt entered the karri country. There they were, one minute driving past paddocks and scrub and next minute Jayden’s little hatchback was enveloped in blonde, serried ranks of the enormous trees. Some valleys the sun now failed to reach and these places were dark, the sky closed over with feathered, crown shy canopy.

  ‘It’s claustrophobic ey,’ Jayden commented.

  ‘In tiger country now,’ Matt said. He’d been quiet on the trip south, not his normal cocky self, a lot of time spent looking at the blue screen of his phone, finding murder ballads on Spotify or glaring out the window.

  They crossed the river into the old timber town.

  ‘Place is just up here.’ Matt had the maps app open on his phone and Cave’s sombre tone was replaced by a chirpy female voice: In 300 metres, turn left onto Sheffield Street. ‘Dunno why we even need an AirBnB, Jay. We’ll be out all night anyway.’

  ‘Promised my Mum.’ Jayden didn’t mind admitting this to his best mate. Twenty four and still beholden to his Mum but Matt knew why and didn’t tease him.

  It was an old mill house, one of many lined up like a little town, opposite the abandoned timber mill. Green shade cloth flapped listlessly against weatherboard walls, presumably to block the afternoon sun on hot days. Smoke curled out of a steel chimney. The house looked like a rental and Jayden wondered how that even worked. He stepped onto the veranda and knocked on the zed door. Matt stayed in the car.

  A man stepped out so quickly he must have been waiting on the other side of the door. ‘Are you two the pickers?’ He looked at Jayden and then to Matt in the car. His face was curiously soft and hard, a criss cross of scars on one russet eyebrow but his skin pale, like he’d stayed indoors all his life and still managed to get beaten up. About as pretty as a ditch, Jayden’s Mum would say.

  ‘Pickers? Nah,’ Jayden turned to Matt, avoiding the man’s raptor stare. ‘We’re heading south. Hopetoun tomorrow.’

  ‘Okay. Just don’t want any pickers stayin’ here. Fucken parasites. Come on, I’ll show you the room.’

  Now that the sun had set on the shortest day, the cold crept out of the earth. The room they’d paid for online was out the back of the house, a veranda that had been converted into a sleepout using mismatched corrugated iron. It was clean and freezing cold. A double bed, a small white plastic blow heater and an ancient television.

  ‘Toilet and bathroom through here,’ the man gestured to what used to be the back door. ‘And if you want to make a coffee in the morning, use the kitchen.’ For some reason, he reminded Jayden of Matt’s Dad. The way he spoke, a man who didn’t bother with menace to be unsettling.

  The man looked at his phone. ‘Matt and Jayden,’ he said but still didn’t introduce himself. ‘Have a good night boys,’ and then disappeared into the house. Matt dropped his backpack and stared around him.

  ‘What the fuck? Have you locked up the car?’

  ‘Let’s just have a cone first.’

  ‘Not in here mate. He’ll smell it. Also, I asked if there were two beds but there’s only one.’ Matt’s gaze around the room and stopped at the wooden chair with a single towel folded on the seat. ‘I don’t mind sharing a bed with you, my brother but I’m not sharing a fucking towel.’ He stuck his hands deep into his hoodie pockets.

  Jayden stooped to flick the switch for the heater. Nothing happened. ‘Heater doesn’t work,’ he said unnecessarily and then tried the TV. ‘Maybe the power’s off out the back here.’ From under the back door there was a thin strip of yellow light and then a wisp of wood smoke from woodstove inside. There was a knock from the inside of the back door.

  The door opened inwards and the man stood, framed by light, holding a stack of towels. He came in and set them down on the chair. ‘Need some extra towels, ey?’ He went back inside the house and came out with an extension cord and power board. ‘Use this for the heater and telly.’

  After he’d left again, Jayden and Matt stared at each other.

  ‘D’you reckon he’s got a camera in here?’ Matt said.

 

'Knows a cool vet'

Today I was driving home and all along the Inlet gravel track were these signs.

 

Some were sticky-taped to trees and others were attached to signs and flapping in the late afternoon wind. They all were made on A4 paper and somebody had obviously made quite a lovely stencil of a white ant and then sprayed the white paper with blue spray paint. Road directions to a bush doof perchance?

Bush doofs happen out this way occasionally and the spotter pilot mentioned today that there were a lot of cars around the area. But then I was nearly home and saw this sign outside Yowie's hut.

I sent a message to my son Stormboy, who used to live at Youngs Siding (apologies to the apostrophe police), about two hundred kilometres away. 'Do you know anything about this?'

'He's wearing his heart on his sleeve. I like him. Knows a cool vet ha ha.'

So many questions like ... how do tissues solve white ant issues?
 

Psychogeography of the inlet

 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.

More camera trap pics

 

So this is a terrible photo but here is your little ginger pig! Her ginger stripe is on the right side of the frame. It's the only image I've been able to get of her so far. Scattered all around are the remains of her foragings: the crimson shells of bloodroot bulbs and kangaroo bones from the roadside. A few months ago, in the summer, someone hit a roo on the track. In the weeks after, the carcass was dismantled piece by piece and, by the looks of this little pig's grotto, this is where it ended up.

When I first moved to the inlet in the midst of winter, I met some pig hunters on the track. Two car loads of young men with cages on the back of their utes, filled with enormous dogs - whiskery lurchers and brindle mastiffs. 'Gidday love,' the first driver said. 

This is wild and woolly country. Marshes, peat bogs, soaring karris and ancient marri trees. 'Seen any pigs around here?' My dog leaned over my shoulder and growled at the caged dogs. All hell broke loose. I hadn't seen any pigs but thought I could send two carloads of slightly pinned men and their dogs somewhere that was not near my place. 'Yeah, saw one yesterday. About 30 Ks up Chesapeake road!'

On a happier note, here are some camera trap photos of some real live kangaroos. I love the infra red ones for their glowing night eyes and larking about. The last one is taken back at the ginger pig grotto. Composition, yes?