Earthrise Diary 709

© Diary Text Don Diespecker 2009

The Earthrise Diary

Don Diespecker

July 29 2009. When I turn my head to the left I see one of the cormorants standing on the bedrock close to ‘my’ riverbank. Clarrie stands there drying his wings and otherwise makes frequent sorties in search of food (he works the adjacent Pool, dodging and diving for small fish, then returns to the small bedrock island where he stands with his wings out, drying in morning sunlight). I suspect that he or perhaps she is a philosophical sort of cormorant: the river is a lively place and he seems to me to be studying the movements of the mainstream and the nearby rapids, keeping a thoughtful eye on me up in the house (the cormorants have very good eyesight), and then, from time to time, launching into the air and beating away downstream. He generally returns, however; he seems to like his little island where wavelets lap; he’s a well-organized bird, a thoughtful predator who likes it here perhaps because he fits in so well. Clarrie is sometimes joined by his fellow cormorants and I see him watching them fly in, their steeply declining approaches, their so very accurate splashdowns and skidding stops. All the cormorants are superb navigators and fliers. Sometimes they all hunt together (and seem also to be, ha ha, larking about: they do big wheelies over the water, hustle each other for fishing spots, demonstrate stunt flying (or so it seems to me). When old Clarrie has had enough for the day, he takes off and wings it to some unknown place of refuge for the night.
July 22 2009. Last night there was a Big Noisy Party nearby and I can still almost feel the gigantic doefdoefdoef thuds of the ‘music’ amplifier or whatever it was that produced the most noise. I imagine that some locals will have become deranged. Three young guys, possible veteran survivors of such noisy parties appeared across the river early this morning and studied the cool and misty waters with interest. Then one waved thoughtfully in my direction (I was sitting dazed, eating, looking at the river through a favourite window) and then they stripped off and plunged in. They hastily re-emerged on the gravel beach and being stoical young chaps plunged in again, but only after some minutes. I was reminded of how indestructible we all thought we were when young and so I remembered similar plunges I’d made in the past and in all kinds of temperatures. There was one bad occasion in 1984 or ’85 when Jannelle and I took the canoe for a paddle on a descending flood… That was not a good idea; we were lucky not to go down with the vessel and because it was midwinter (as now) we were a long time drying out and re-warming. It’s more relaxing to remember less foolish and much warmer times: hiking in the upper reaches of the Mooi River in distant Natal on a hot day and all of us plunging into the cold torrent without mishap. Exuberance! The Mooi River (mooi may mean either pretty or handsome in Afrikaans) in those 1940s days was a beautiful trout stream and its upper reaches were close to Giants Castle (11,000 ft) on the Natal/Basutoland border in the mighty Drakensberg. Nowadays and although those same places remain where I last experienced them we might think of the same mountain as being partly in Lesotho and partly in kwa-Zulu Natal. Everything does change, especially names.
Although the date indicates midwinter here, Nature decided weeks ago, that spring has arrived at this bend in the river. There are new pink leaves on the red cedars (including the ones here that normally leaf later than the trees that stand more in sunlight—some of the Earthrise reds are much more in or partly contained by the forest). Even more perplexing: the soil here is so saturated from the recent three floods that the grass and some plants have continued growing as though summer has been extended. The tough lomandra plants growing wild and naturally a few metres downstream on this side of the river look (absurdly) well tended and are thriving despite having been metres beneath the most violent aspects of the flooding (they’re very tough plants with delicate-looking though powerful root systems and unearthing one requires much digging). The possibly ‘local’ wild grass, a gift of the river in recent times and now becoming the predominant lawn grass, has survived most of the flooding on Big Lawn and I’ve been liberating more of the grass by raking. Low parts of Big Lawn were well and truly buried in the third flood and are now almost certainly lawn archaeology, i.e., unavoidably dead as well as unreachable by rake. The entire lawn is ‘rising’ due to increasing spreads of sandy flood loam having been deposited in recent times. There is older lawn archaeology beneath these recent deposits because the original mix of grasses that was not scoured away was buried by more than 0.5-m by the big 2001 flood. (Sometimes when digging I realize that I’ve cut into ‘preserved’ elements of the Lost Big Lawn). I should explain that the March 2001 flood was about 2.5-m higher than the most recent flood here and it either buried the old grasses that comprised most of the lawn or it scoured other parts of the lawn that simply vanished downstream with the torrent. The most three floods were high enough to completely remove certain items: a tree fern (without trace) that I’d planted 20 years ago; shrubs, small plants.
Recent days here have been bright and sunny with midday temperatures as high as 20-23K˚C, the temperatures of summer! No wonder so much has kept growing and no wonder spring has demandingly nudged its way into/onto Earthrise.
On Friday, July 17, I was reading Manguel with relish in a sunny patch outside. I looked up and saw a curious movement across the river where young casuarinas were flattened by the floods and now were attempting to again stand upright. I saw a dark shape on the trunk of one tree and at first thought it a large bird, possibly a brush turkey. Then, I thought, it might perhaps be a possum because in that light I was unable to see, at first, that the creature’s true colour was grey. Eventually the animal leaped adroitly sideways and onto a neighbouring tree where I could clearly see it was grey and to my surprise, unmistakably a koala. This was the first koala I’ve seen in the wild and although I’d heard that the cuddly critters had indeed been sighted in the Valley in recent times, I’d not seen one in 25 years; until now. I walked over to the road, then down to the bridge to verify this unusual sighting and eventually saw the visitor swimming valiantly across the Pool, so I raced back here and stood watching from the bank. Sure enough, the koala emerged, dripping, and then calmly walked up a middle-aged and well-established casuarina (one that has survived many big floods) until it reached a fork high above me. I applauded the visitor who seemed unmoved by my attention and s-he then settled high up in the tree in afternoon sunlight and stared sleepily downstream. Although I was sure it would move on in search of tasty gum leaves I named him/her Brett, a name I like (remember Brett Ashley, Lady Ashley in The Sun Also Rises?) because it has a neutral ring to it; it could be either a him or a her. Needless to say, he or she has now disappeared. The hillside (or mountainside) here has some splendid big eucalypts growing on the slopes. Here’s hoping the Little Fur can avoid the foxes and other predators like wild dogs. Fare thee well Brett!
Saturday July 25. I’m listening to Rodolfo and Mimi describing their lives at the end of Act 1 of La Boheme (Christmas Eve: a garret overlooking snow-covered Parisian rooftops). Rodolfo’s friends call impatiently and the pair go downstairs to join the others at the Café Momus. In a sunny winter at Earthrise Puccini’s music touches me, as always. The sun shining in through the stained glass sends long images of deep blue and gold across my writing table; the flashing river runs by.

Guest Writing in the Diaries
I’ve lived and worked in a variety of beautiful, exotic and fascinating places: Victoria on Vancouver Island, Pilgrim’s Rest in the Transvaal Drakensberg, Durban in Natal, London and Paris and for a short period, Tehran; 10 years in Newcastle and nearly 15 years in the Wollongong area of New South Wales, and I’ve visited many other countries as a traveller or tourist. Year 26 of living here at Earthrise began about three weeks ago; I’ve lived in this place—at this bend of the Bellinger River and on the edge of the Darkwood Forest—longer than I’ve lived anywhere on Earth. Despite the dangers of bushfires, floods (and very heavy local rains), windstorms and falling trees (very big and tall trees) and landslips (a weathered cliff hangs precariously above and close to the house), I’m comfortable at Earthrise and would rather live here in sometimes uncomfortable and dangerous situations than anywhere else. Intentionally coming to this place following an early retirement was never a difficult choice; for most of my life I held an ambition to live in a wild place, on the banks of a marvellous river, and either in or close to a forest: a place where I could build my own house. There is a sub-tropical rainforest near the house and the rainforest’s creek visibly spills into the river downstream and ahead of me. Wild animals pass through as though the place were theirs (and of course it is). I enjoy seeing many species of birds—waterbirds including those magnificent fliers, the cormorants and sometimes fishing eagles—even the regent bowerbird in all his splendour. And, yes, I even have mod cons like electricity and a computer in the house that Jannelle and I built together in 1984.
This is a long-winded way of saying that place has always been an important consideration; indeed, I even enjoy writing about aspects of place without particularly heeding how such writings can or may or even should be made. For years much of my writing has been specifically about this place, Earthrise; this place is part of my fiction writings as well as my nonfiction. I enjoy reading some nature writing and recently bought what seemed from its title to be both unusual and interesting: A Place on Earth. An anthology of Nature Writing from Australia & North America which is edited by Mark Tredinnick and jointly published by the University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln and London) and the University of New South Wales Press (Sydney). I mention this because I’m quickly discovering that the ‘literature of place’ is considered to be a part of the genre ‘nature writing’ (I’d be tempted to say that I’ve been writing about place and places—as we all do when engaged in any/all kinds of writing—except that writings on place appear to cross and spill over into a variety of genres (e.g., many kinds of nonfiction such as essays, journalism and memoirs and even broadly ‘scientific’ reports; as well as poetry and novels may all contain aspects of this so-called literature of place). Such writers/authors may be primarily essayists, ecologists, researchers, novelists and poets, environmental historians and conservationists. In anthologies like the one I’ve mentioned, we can expect to find excellent examples of creative or literary nonfiction writing; we will then appreciate that gardeners and historians and scientists also write about place. I don’t wish to make comparisons of writings in the above anthology beyond suggesting that there are obvious emphases on landscape in those writings and to add that seascape, riverscape and for argument’s sake, a house or a room, may also deservedly be thought of and written about as aspects of the literature of place. Are there rules about this, I wonder, and if there are, rules invariably change or evolve in time.
Because some of my writing interests are in the writing of creative nonfiction and stream-of-consciousness narratives (interior monologue and free indirect style) I invite readers to join me by writing about Place. The use of the free indirect style, for example, is appropriate in writing narrative nonfiction as it is in writing fiction. My Collins Dictionary of Literary Terms doesn’t list key words such as nature writing or the literature of place, nor does the entry nature/art encompass either a literature of place or nature writing. However, there is an entry describing diegesis/mimesis and both free indirect style and interior monologue are discussed therein. Free indirect style and interior monologue are also given their own separate entries. Narrative, similarly, has an entry (the term applies to nonfiction as well as to fiction). I’ve not (yet) searched via Google. The literature of place, as a sub genre requiring guidelines (at least, by me) seems fertile ground for any literary researcher/writer. Any offers?
With ‘a literature of place’ in mind I recently sent an email invitation to Diary readers and that is reproduced here:

“Dear Earthrise Diary Readers,
I hope to include more of your writings in future Diaries, beginning, soon, with contributions about Place (as in the genre 'the literature of place' which sometimes is categorized as an aspect of 'nature writing'.
No, this is NOT any kind of competition.
Please feel free to write a nonfiction piece (or several pieces) describing, in any style, tense, structure, or form, a place of significance to you (like the imaged one that now instantly appears in your mind). About 1-k words or even more!
Place has 46 meanings/explanations/descriptions in my Random House College Dictionary. Consider the first of these: "A particular portion of space, whether of definite or indefinite extent."
I often write on sundry aspects of Earthrise--the river views, Big Lawn in the moonlight, the Belvedere, the wild life & so on. One of your 'favourite' places might be a caravan, a river in South America, a Room of Your Own, a hillside in the Dordogne, the cabin of your boat, a café terrace in Paris, a meadow, a paddock, a field or hillside, a monastery or nunnery, a fortress or dungeon or palace, any outstanding place, some important place somewhere which has a particular importance to you. One of your unforgettably significant places might even be here at Earthrise!
Whatever you write about that looks printable, readable, interesting, awesome, romantic, dramatic, fantastic, comforting, entertaining and informative will be included; each piece will be headed by the title of the piece and your name and your copyright (e.g., © text Frederika Smith 2009). Please bear in mind that the Earthrise Diaries is at, and may be read on the Net at:
http://earthrisediaries.blogspot.com/
I'll assume that anyone/everyone may see our writings (even Publishers, even Editors, even Lit Agents, even the Nobel Committee!). I'm not keen to edit anything other than to add or delete an obvious comma or a spelling correction and will discuss any other suggested changes by email.
Best from Don.”

Readers may recall that Brenda Herzberg was my guest in the 1108 Diary and that her essay, “Other Worlds” was included in the November 2008 edition; the essay is a place example. I’m happy to announce that two place essays, as responses to my email invitation, are included in this 709 edition. My guests are Russell Atkinson and Petra Meer (selected excerpts of Petra’s writings may also be found in earlier Diary editions).
In the next (809, August) Diary I’ll present further guest writings. The invitation remains open. In addition to nonfiction writings in essay form about Place, please consider writing another form of nonfiction: writings on biography, autobiography, memoir and written in either conventional orthodox styles OR (a) either free indirect style, or (b) as interior monologue, or (c) in a mixed style (conventional/orthodox; free indirect; and interior monologue). See Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway for a superb example of an entire novel written in free indirect style; see James Joyce’s Ulysses (the last section known as ‘Molly Bloom’s soliloquy’ as an astonishing example of interior monologue); see also Ulysses for many examples of Joyce’s mixed style.

© Text RF Atkinson 2009
Sand Castles
Russell Frank Atkinson

Four hundred thousand years ago, sand, spiraling up through the surfs from way down south began to pile up off the coast of Australia below the Tropic of Capricorn.
Who knows now, the concatenation of forces, currents, or accidents, some perhaps reaching out into the cosmos that caused these sand islands off the Queensland coast?
Perhaps it was piles of pumice stone spewed out from the cluster of volcanoes whose jagged cores rise lofty above the coastal flats on the mainland that trapped the sand so long ago. As the sands built up above the tides, the first to come were the sea birds resting. It wasn’t long – a few thousand years maybe that the sand piles were fecund islands with ecosystems all their own; forests, lakes, lagoons, wet lands and vibrant heaths. Kangaroos, wallabies, dingoes, and emus waded over the sand drifts or maybe as adventurous as Columbus or Magellan, swam out to discover new worlds.
Then humans came to give everything a name. They called the oyster Ningi, the fern whose tuber they ate, Bungwall, the hardy little tree of knobbed, grey bark and brittle spiky leaves that rattle in the wind, Wallum. White-skinned people who now live on these islands have their own names for everything but they call the heath lands by its old aboriginal name. It’s a good name for the hardy, prickly little plants of the Wallum. Like the tree, the Wallum is without grace, but is of great character.
From the ancient spirit of the island’s point of view, we new humans are queer creatures indeed and it resents our intrusion. We have asphyxiated the earth with smotherings of cement and asphalt, run cattle over it. Men in suits have developed whole creeks and wetlands out of existence and felled the diverse forests to plant huge areas with pine—a tree the island’s creatures have little use for except as a perch for an exhausted parrot looking for an old gum with a nesting hole in it.
The ancient spirit sharp as sand and as magical as a silicone chip, does not inhabit the entire island any more, for where the new humans have gathered, the spirit departs. Yet in some places, if you stand very still, intently listening, you may hear the echo of it’s chanting. The old spirit comes about as soon as I get beyond the sound of a car, down one of the tracks into the Wallum or into the sand flats behind the beach near where Mathew Flinders had a run-in with the locals so he called it Skirmish Point. Here for reasons I wonder at, are hectares of undulating sand covered mostly in spinifex. Way back from the beach it meets a sharp rise where the scrub starts; gums, wattles, banksias and tea trees, nothing over three meters high. Bonsai-ed I guess, by dryness, salt winds and sand where they battle it out in true Aussie style, too thick to walk through.
The old spirit chants its soft self-obsessed song here over the muted sound of the Pacific beating into the bay up the channels off Morton Island. It tells me that the rise was once the first of the dunes not so long ago (as time with old spirits goes) and that the sea came into a deep bay here where the Dugongs fed on the sea grasses and the aborigines netted them in the season according to the totem.
Behind the soft slow chanting in this lonely place, there hums a primal silence. There is little visible life in this arid place, though I can see rows of little indentations in the sand where a crab has wandered about exploring far beyond its hole, so laboriously dug.
Sometimes I amuse myself following their wanderings, wondering what the funny little sideways creatures, eyes up on stalks, had in mind when they suddenly turned left or right, or circumnavigated a hillock instead of seeing what gives from up on top. How, I wonder, do they see their hole from such a distance? Eyes on stalks must be helpful but it doesn’t explain the beeline accuracy with which a startled crab gets home.
When the tide is out the crabs get the spirit of adventure and hundreds explore down to the waters edge sampling delicious bits of detritus, shoveled into the mouth one claw after the other. But come I thirty meters or more away and ZAP! Back they go, four legs sideways down their own personal burrows. How they do the four legs sideways thing without tumbling over is another wonder.
After many experiments, I have not seen any indication of confusion about which hole belongs to which crab. By the time I get to crabsville walking the beach in the gloaming, there is not a crab to be seen. If I stand still awhile, a crab appears at the mouth of its hole, four legs in, four legs out. Then another and another; eye stalks doing the full 360.Then comes the tentative amble, but the slightest movement on my part and the beach is crabless again.
Crabs are smart little intelligences that have come up with the idea of putting their skeleton on the outside. This is one reason they still inhabit the planet with an ancestry going back to the Beginning. But just how good is a good idea in the long run? Putting the skeleton on the outside has insured for the crustaceans a permanent place on the roll call of life forms but has fixed forever their lowly place on the ascending spiral. C’est la vie.
No matter. One can be sure that one of the first creatures to take up residence on these old islands were crabs, who have been busy cleaning up the detritus ever since the island was a sand bar.

About the Author: Russell Atkinson is a retired naturopath. He was Managing Editor of Nature and Health Magazine in the 70's and Contributing Editor to Wellbeing Magazine. He is the author of 8 books, many articles and poems and unpublished short stories. His A Spiritual Magazine website is: www.members.westnet.com.au/theako





© Text Petra Meer 2009

Sea Pod - ‘Zydico’

Petra Meer

Standing on her decks, I am standing on a seed waiting for the wind to take hold. A seed made to travel the seas, like that of a mangrove or coconut tree. My seed is large and designed to stay upright, always allowing for one surface to remain dry, a viewing platform to stand on and from where to look out over a vast moving terrain, the sea. Looking up I see the mast of this 'sea pod' drawing imagined circles over the clouds, lolling about; the ocean even when calm, is in motion, gentle motion in this moment. Looking out I see new vistas, lolling, rolling vistas where the line of the horizon in every moment is carrying the new silhouette of a coming landfall.
In her way, the ocean, (in a moment such as this), can seem like one vast sheet of fabric, rolling out, straightening and lifting, then falling over and over: a blue-green velvet expanse. Offshore the ocean is dark and only surface life is visible from the deck. Kelp threads, foam bubbles, Blue Bottles and 'Sail by the Wind' float by on a current slower than ours, for we have the canvas up, a headsail, trying to catch a breath of wind to move us along toward tonight's anchorage. When it is calm like this, the sun makes silver shards dance on the ocean, the rhythm is soothing and the dolphins enjoy our bow waves. Like this I could sail on forever, never caring about clocks and wallets, cars and timetables, just the tides as they breath in and out and the wind’s gentle push from behind, singing 'move along little seed, move along and grow'.
A Flying Fish darts out of the sea, a mythical creature, shimmering wings...
The wind picks up and begins to blow a louder tune. She is the master and sister to the sea and we must dance to her tune, as the wind and the weather are the true test of sailors and seedpods alike! The water is stirring up and lapping higher, the rolling increases. Peaks are forming foam at their tops; they travel for a time and then fold in onto themselves and into others, a mass of triangles, edges and sculpted points. Then, in turn, we are rocked more aggressively also and more wildly with the winds shoving. Sister sea is rough and irregular, the sea birds wail and the clouds gather around us to watch and descend.
The sky begins to cry. The decks are slippery and hard to stand on; the seed case is smooth and made to glide easily through the water. We must shift and lurch to her tune, pull in the sail and protect our bodies. Not new, none of this is new. It is old, so very primordial, the wind on the water and the rain on the sea. The clouds have gathered an infinite number of times overhead. In these moments I long for the earth under my feet, to be on the shore and looking out over the sea, encapsulated in some warm still place, elsewhere.
The Cockpit is a halfway place, a place to watch from, a place just inside the inner lining of the husk. It still gets wet here, rain spitting into our eyes, drops falling onto the sea, pock-marking it’s fabric. The silhouette of land has gone from view and hope becomes more difficult to sustain even though we are in no danger; doubts come when one has a healthy respect for the elements. For She and her many hands can move any place they please and we must move along with her. This is the lore of the sea.
On a boat (or a 'sea pod'), time has a different measure. The cycles are the measure of time. Currents are surging in and out with the tides, pulled by the moon, wind moving the clouds this way and that as the temperatures fall and rise again; the sun rising and setting as we rotate around her in the cosmos... It is this greater awareness of a Master timekeeper one finds living on and in the sea. All creatures know their moments and seasons well. They come and they leave when it is their time; they are born in thousands and die as food for other creatures. They do not fight the flow of their season, but know it intuitively. While floating, I follow the rules of this great clock, sleeping with the birds and waking when they do, moving quietly when in the presence of visiting creatures, taking only what is surplus... I live within her limits and stay well for doing so.
The storm eases and it becomes late, the sun is sinking. Time to find a restful anchorage, but 'restful' does not mean still, nothing is ever still, not on the water, not in life. All things are changing, ceaselessly changing. To let go of the need to 'be the same' or 'to be still' is a great lesson of the sea for She is the living moving image of change, a mirror of our own inevitable changing form and being. Change is a rule not only of the sea but of life, it is our great purpose and as I move to go below deck I look around at the ebb and flow of life occurring all about me.
36.14’54.53S
150.13’31.47E
The ground tackle has been set into the sand, she's firm and not dragging and we’re swinging safely. We move, we rock and are cradled in Her hands; she envelops us in tiredness and signals that sleep must come. As the last of the birds find their roosts, the sun completes its arc of the sky and the moon rises to the horizon line. Everything is silenced. The water is calmed by the evening breeze coming from the shore, the slight lapping on the hull will oscillate through the night with the tides; as they rise we move, more so. The waves sound loudly from the shore, seeming closer to me than my own breath. I am in the belly of my boat now, my home, a seedpod on the sea, filled with the growing bodies of life in my family and in me. We will never cease to grow, to change as She continues to testify.
The scent of the shore comes to me in my bunk, layers of algae lining the dunes. In the morning I will walk the length of the shore taking all the time I need, for I am in no hurry. The tides will move in and out through the night, and do the same again tomorrow, and again... The sun will rise and meet it's climax then sink again, the birds will wake at the first sign of light in the heavens and begin to search for food and I will walk the shore and be who I am, both of and from the sea.

About the Author: Petra Meer is a Visual Artist who recently spent three years living on a yacht called ‘Zydico’ with her family, sailing up the east coast of Australia. She is presently studying in Victoria and living by the Yarra River in the mountains outside Melbourne (far from the sea and longing for Her often).

Sunday, July 26. It’s another largely gray day here at Earthrise. When not writing and remembering (lots of imagery) this month, I’ve been flitting in and out of sunny garden patches for my lunchtime reading and then trundling my high-tech tools (two rakes and a spade) across the top-dressed Big Lawn (which I’m beginning to think is now permanently wet). I’m concerned about squashing too many of the new blades of grass… I transport suitable stones from other garden locations to the Dog’s Garden where the new circular wall is taking shape. Gardeners will know what excitements may be found in trundling heavy wheelbarrows: with every good-looking stone transported and eased into its new position (crafted into place by deft touches with the spade), there’s a sense of wellbeing. Similar feelings repeat each time I glance through a window from inside the house and see the strangely wet brown ‘lawn’ integrate the growing patches of green that continue to re-emerge. I think of these revivifying parts, overall, as an enlarging green blush.
When searching through the myriad papers I came across these words by, I think, Tu Mu (from The Penguin Book of Chinese Verse (AR Davis, translator):

My small son tugs at my coat and asks;
‘Why so late in coming home?
With whom have you been racing the years and months
For this prize of silk-white hair?’

This Diary is # 20 in the New Series (previously 1107, 108, 208, 308, 408, 508, 608, 708, 808, 908, 1008, 1108, 1208, 109, 209, 309, 409, 509, 609; this is 709) DDD July 29 2009.