Notes From The Tower

FAQ

Mount Frankland is part of the DBCA’s tourist trails in the national parks around Walpole, so naturally the fire tower folk meet plenty of people on holidays. Summitting climbers are often surprised to see someone in the tower and here are some of their questions.

 

“Dr Livingston, I presume?”

Yes, and I feel thankful that I am here to welcome you

 

“What are you doing?”

I’m looking for smoke and doing weather reports.

 

“Are they still doing this? I thought that was back in the olden days!”

We’ve been doing fire and weather lookout here since the 1960s. It’s a simple system for early detection of bushfires.

 

“Do you serve ice-cream?”

No. Bring your own ice-cream.

 

“Do you get taken up by helicopter?”

I got up here the same way as you just did.

 

“Great office!”

I know, right?

 

“Do you come up here every day?”

Yes, between December and March.

 

“Don’t you use AI or drones?”

Human eyes and knowledge of the landscape is pretty accurate. AI cameras are getting better at detecting smoke and one day my job will be sitting in front of a computer rather than atop a mountain. At the moment, I can see a smoke hours before it registers on a heat map.

 

“Are you alone the whole time?”

I hope you may be parsing this question wrong but also please don’t be creepy.

 

“How many hours do you do?”

That depends on the fire danger index. My day gets longer as the FDI goes up.

 

“Are you a volunteer?”

(This question always bugs me. Who would volunteer their whole summer when they could be making heaps of money elsewhere. Unless they are retired – and therefore, the insinuation is that I’m old and retired? Whoa, it’s getting personal now.)

No. I’m paid very well, thank you very much.

 

“Do you climb up three times a day like those old tower guys?”

I bring up my lunch.

 

“How many fires have you seen?”

Lots. Christmas Day, New Years Day and I caught that one over near Mt Barker a week ago.

 

“There are no toilets up here. Where do you go to the toilet?”

Bush wees are no problem. Bush poos are horrible and problematic. Would you like me to elaborate?

 

“What do you do with your time?”

I love audio books and podcasts and the radio. I can’t really read books because my eyes are down and I need to be looking up and around, constantly scanning the horizon.

Liz and the Tingles

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: 

https://slwa.wa.gov.au/wimminswork

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.

 

Noticing

Hey this is interesting ... the marri tree I thought was killed by the Armillaria fungi has come back to life. It lives about fifty metres from my house and has done so for at least the last century. Now it's sending out epicormic growth, which means it's stressed but a whole lot better than being dead. Here is something I wrote about the tree, that ancient King, a few years ago.

"The armillarias killed the old marri down by the inlet shore in the winter. Armillaria mycelium is no friendly communicant for trees but its aggressor and will feed on the decaying carcass for decades. The thugs of the fungi kingdom. The mushrooms, beautiful sheaves of gold, perfect and succulent, climbed the craggy bark like marauders up the castle keep, relentless, until they cancered the ancient king."

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth,
Our foot’s in the door.

Sylvia Plath, 'Mushrooms'

 

How do you write about a tree?

 A quiet day today, a walk around the block and thoughts about human and more-than human relationships. I've just re-read the essay by Ingrid Horrocks about writing nature called Dissolving Genre: Toward finding new ways to write about the world. Together with a colleague, I've run workshops and talks about writing the environment and the Anthropocene - and it always great to read what other writers have to say about this immersive but elusive practice.

The hound and the guardian tree

In the essay, she writes of meanings and modes of what she calls eco-nonfiction, ways to move beyond human frames of reference ('Is it possible to write or draw a forest?')

 

Velvet Earth Tongue emerging from the Marri litter

Close observation and attention

     This kowphai bloom, that estuary

     This possum, that coal fire

 

Hovea elliptica are really popping!

Ordinary or unpromising locations

     Edgelands

     The flourishing of motorway burbs

A secret pond in the bush near my place

Avoids idealisation of pristine wilderness

     Fewer epiphanies in national parks

     Fewer men on mountains

 

Favours systems that include humans

     More suburbs, kitchens, children parents

     But also oceans, rivers, oysters

Mother Marri

Observes altered worlds

      Eucalypts in San Francisco

       Ice melts in Antarctica

       Rewildings

 

And lost worlds

      Endlings: an animal that is the last of its species

Peppermint paving

Often draws on memoir

      I, sometimes we

 

Finds continuities between the human and nonhuman

       Warm breath misting

 

Demands we move outside a human frame of reference

“Is it possible to draw or write a forest?”

 

Struggles with how to do this

signed here.

 

Searches for organic forms and structures opening out stories of confluence

“What do I know but pieces, all at once?”

 

Understands that in the 21st century “to write about nature is a political act”

Hopes (within hopes) that a shift in attention
–a yielding of consciousness to a world beyond human–
will give to a shift in action.

 Ingrid Horrocks, 'Dissolving Genre: writ with water', in Bending Genre: essays on creative nonfiction, Bloomsbury, 2014.