Sarah Drummond's Blog, page 9

North and the Norsemen

 

This is facing north from the firetower. 360 degrees is just to the left of that granite queen of awesomeness called Burubunnup or Mount Roe. Back to her later. Out past Smythe Hill, it's really hard to judge distances because there are few landmarks and the country flattens out. Tricky country. I've come unstuck a few times seeing a plume of dark smoke go up, only to find it's someone working a tractor sixty or eighty kilometres away. Dust, smoke, sea mist and steam are all elemental particles and behave the same way in the air. It's easy to make a mistake and these days I forgive myself for calling in cloud and gravel road 'smokes', or I give the caveat in my report as 'it may be dust, but'.

 A lot of old maps had the original Noongar place names on them. We live in a country where place names, highways, roads and histories, even the seasons of the year have been supplanted, superimposed ... where one culture colonised another. I've read that one of the reasons the colonisers kept Noongar names, before extensive mapping of certain areas, was to ensure that they could find their way back to water holes or other spots using Noongar guides. The vestiges of old maps reflect this, whereas the more recent cartographers did away with the practice. Google maps ... well ... it works when in the city but pity the city tourist relying on it.

Recently we had lots of climbers come up the mountain. They freak me out a bit because I'll hear voices after hours of being alone (no not like that) and then suddenly some people will pop up from the western edge of the granite.

 'You guys are freaks,' I'll say as they walk towards me, all swinging crampons, grins, endorphins and ropes. 'Who even does that shit?' and then 'How do you deal with the march flies?'

I give them the binoculars and tell them to look at Burubunnup. There's no road there, or trail and they know it, but I can always see them slaver at the chance to climb that beautiful granite. I look at her every day.

Finally, my tower day today was pretty quiet and so I spent it listening to Seamus Heaney reading his own translation of Beowulf. Oh. My. God. This is probably the best version I've heard. My one problem, as with most Beowulf translations, is that Grendel's mother still doesn't get nearly enough air time.

 

Freshening up the tower

Today while up the fire tower, I began drawings of landmark profiles, using former tower man Tim's work as a guide. His illustrations are now a bit dusty, mouldy and spider-spotted - it's been a five years since he drew them. But I've always loved looking up to the profiles when trying to get coordinates on a smoke. Part of what we do when spotting for fires is a compass bearing, with the tower as centre, and then an estimation of distance. Once we have these two elements, we can work out the exact location of the fire. Our map table has elevations, which helps us line up the distance of a smoke according to a nearby landmark. After that, it's all guesswork until the spotter plane goes overhead. The profiles help enormously, which is why I'm in the process of freshening them up. Here's the one from the western window of the tower that I did today.

There's a new mobile phone tower right before Beardmore Ridge that I probably should have included. Phone towers are really useful because even though they're ugly, they stand out like dog's balls (both and the same maybe) and are great for judging distance. Spotter pilots and water bombers are wary of them and lighthouses during bushfires, for obvious reasons.

The Dinosaur Egg Hill is a granite peak and really charismatic to stare at. That hill at 1-2 kilometres west of the tower looks like you could reach out and touch it in real life. It's laddered with old growth karris and sometimes I can peer into that forest with binoculars and see bird's nests in the canopy and odd, secret caves. The farm is a good one because it is one of the few paddocks I can see in the national parks. And then there's the inlet where I live, in the south west inset - a sliver of silver before the primary dunes that protect it from the sea. Thirty kilometres away ...

 

In between drawing, watching and listening for smoke reports from the spotter pilots, I quite often devolve into that daft mental friction of doomscrolling. I begin with checking the Emergency WA website for prescribed burns and bushfires on my phone, in case I've missed anything going on, and then somehow I end up on twitter.

The last few weeks have felt like I'm back to March 2020 anxiety levels, with more knowledge and less surety. If that sounds like an oxymoron, our little hermit state is set to open up to the rest of the world in a few weeks time. We've watched the world suffer and we've been so bloody lucky here, shut away, with lockdowns that rarely last more than a few days and that are usually triggered by a single community case. Out into the world we go, ho hum. 

I will continue drawing these profiles. Over the next week or so, you'll get north, east and south.

Sad Parrot Story in Four Parts

 Okay, so this parrot probably wasn't sad but maybe the story is. I'm not sure, we'll see how we go on semantics here.

Part One. I found a young 28 parrot standing, looking dazed, in the middle of the road and when I stopped, I put on my hazard lights because it is a busy road. I chased this baby into the forest where it hid in some sword grass to get away from me. It obviously couldn't fly, its adult feathers were only partially grown in length, so it was more a waddle than a chase. Eventually, after getting numerous paper cuts from the sword grass, I got a towel wrapped around the bird and put it in the car.

Part Two. It's a really hot day, even for a full throated summer hot day. So when I got to the IGA to do some grocery shopping, I left both car windows wide open, with the bird wrapped, muted and subdued, in the footwell of the passenger side. I was thinking, thank goodness I hadn't brought my dog along for the ride this day. Inside the store, I bought dog biscuits, wine, a cooked chook, some bird seed and a little glass water dropper. I stopped to chat with a local surfer who wants to write a book and a woman who'd been hiking the Bibulmum Track who wants to write a book. 

Back at my car, I decided I'd drop in to see Flame and show her the parrot. She knows some wildlife carers who'd take care of it. I carried the towelled parcel of parrot carefully onto her back veranda and the parcel was light but birds are light, right, and I said, 'have a look at this, Flame,' unwrapped the towel to find .... nothing!!!

Part Three. Drove home in a state of abject disappointment and a kind of stupid-stupid-me self loathing. Windows wide open, so-called flightless parrot, I mean for all my good intentions, I was wondering if this parrot just wanted a lift to the shops. 

In the morning, I made ready for a day on the fire tower, still feeling a bit sore about losing the parrot. 'But it flying away is a good thing, right?' I was telling myself as I made a sandwich.  I resolved to ask the IGA staff if they'd seen it in the fruit section. Got in the car and the first thing I saw was this parrot wombling back under the passenger seat where it had been hiding ALL NIGHT.

Part Four. Luckily I had a pillowcase in the car (don't ask), so when we arrived at the mountain car park, I pulled the parrot out from under the passenger seat, put it in the pillowcase and walked up the mountain, carrying the parrot, my water bottle, my back pack and my special stick.

 

My friend who normally does wildlife rescue in the area was on holidays so I rang my boss running the burn that day for advice. 'Do you have any electrolytes?' she asked me. I looked around the tower. We have to carry everything up here. Mmm. No electrolytes. But I had some honey and lots of water. 'That'll do for the moment.' she told me, 'and some flower nuts, maybe melaluca or small eucs.'

For the rest of the day I fed the baby parrot honey water with the glass dropper and began to fall completely in love. It was like a bonding I've only experienced twice before in my life, with this parrot seeing the dropper and understanding really bloody fast what it meant. I imagined having a bird for a friend and familiar, a parrot to hang out with. The 28 looked stronger and stronger throughout the day. I took it home, put it in a cardboard box, which it promptly climbed out of to inspect the room.

My dog Selkie watched this parrot walk her very own estate. She was looking at me and then looking at this parrot, who ambled happily around the carpet and under the bed, across the kitchen vinyl and into the toilet. Selkie looked back at me and I could tell the dog was asking me, 'What the actual FUCK? You mean I'm not even allowed to kill and eat this thing?'

Part Five. Yes I'm quite aware there's not a part five here.

'So what happened?' Asked my mate Rick.

'Well, the parrot died,' I said.

'Oh that's a shit story Sarah!' He said, and his girlfriend laughed. 'Did the dog knock it off?'

'No! I got up in the morning, ready for another day on the tower, thinking I'd take the parrot with me again. When I looked in the box, it was kinda stretching out its beak and looking weird ... I picked it up and it died in my arms.'

'Yeah. Well. Shit story Sarah.'

 

PS, thanks to Rick for keeping it real and also to my boss in Nat Cons who said that the recovery rate is really low for parrots but for a moment in time, I had a parrot who considered me their mother.

Encounter

This morning on my climb up to the firetower, a kangaroo stopped me on the stairs.

 We watched each other. Both of us were quite still, me with my karri hazel stick and backpack and tiger snake jitters, he with an interrupted mouthful of grass.

 I'd just climbed the two steel-runged ladders so I wondered how this old boy made it to this part of the mountain. It's sheer granite cliffs all around and here he is! Maybe he climbed up the eastern side. Eventually, with me having a chat with him about how I had to start work in about four minutes time, the boomer let me pass and ambled onto mossy granite to the east of the stairs. The granite incline was at least 45 but he stayed there to watch me.

It's such an odd sense to see an animal as big as me up here, but the roos are more curious than scared on the mountain, when I see them on the lower sections. Several generations have lived here without being hunted and dogs have been banned from this area for decades. Dingos are pretty much extinct in these parts too, so there are no apex predators for kangaroos to worry about.

On that note, I've been reading Charlotte McConaghy's 'Once There were Wolves', a novel about the reintroduction of wolves into Scotland.

 

Hi, still here x

Two little girls in flowered dresses walked past our group today. One (her hat was pink, her hair was blonde) held an ice cream. "We're sharing this ice cream," she said to us all, "because we are good at sharing," and we watched them walk by with collegial murmurings about how cute they were. At the time we were carrying out emergency evacuation training that involved how to get hundreds of tourists out of this forest enclave in the event of a bush fire.

The two little girls were nearly out of earshot when I heard the blonde-haired kid whisper to her mate, "You know this is my ice cream. You can't have any."

First thing, first day of firetower. First challenge was the two trees fallen across my road out to the highway. I sat in my car for an hour, ringing friends, checking emails and waiting for the shire guys to turn up. They did, with their usual good humour, back hoe and chainsaw.

The swans are back from their inland sojourn. They were late to the inlet this year, possible because inland paddocks and marshes have been wetter for longer after this winter. I heard them return about five nights ago, singing and honking like adenoidal teenagers, as they gossiped their way home, to moult, to nest, to fish for cockles.

October

So nice to see you, inlet.

I feel like I've been driving for months and suddenly it's the equinox again. It took my Mum to remind me last week, and now there's the quickening between day and night that always throws me this time of year. A woman walks down to the seashore at dusk, glass of wine, sunnies and beanie, just like in the month of May - low sun and cool dusk. The sun slips and the darkening is faster but the kids are still yelling from the chilly waters. Orchids are rising their sex from the earth. My dog goes for a wander and returns with the desiccated leg of a kangaroo, crouches on the concrete and growls at any blow flies that get too close. They are new to this season too.

In the winter, right before I left for the big smoke, my car blew its head and this is an expensive exercise for a diesel. Queen Ben (car) is limping through now, avoiding any other medical procedures until the previous bill is paid up. Billowing smoke on a cold morning? C'mon, lovely lady, you can do it, just get out of bed for me one more time. Ignore those cold weather glow plug pains, baby.

Yesterday I taught in the city and then today I drove a long way to do our pre season fire training for the other job I have. I tied up Selkie in the courtyard at work. She'd been in the car for hours but she's long been my Girl Selkie and waited patiently on her makeshift bed, beside her silver bowl of water, accepting pats and copious stroking from all those fire fighters who are away from home and miss their own.

Then home to the inlet. Fisherfolk, returning from setting their nets this evening, their outboards blurp blurped as they headed to shore. The crunch of hull on coarse sand.

So yes, it's nice to see you, inlet. It's good to be home.

 

Channel 40 on the school run

 

In 400 metres, take the 2ndexit onto Stirling Highway

What was my Mum like when she was a baby, Nanna Sarah?

She had amazing eyes, Gracie, bright blue with dark rings around the outside. 

She’s got green eyes now.

Yes. 

What else? Was she funny? 

Yeah. She talked all the time, in another language, garble garble garble. I wish I’d taped her talking. 

My brother doesn’t talk yet. He just lies and sleeps and then he wakes up for milk. 

I always wanted a brother. A big brother though. Someone to stick up for me. Having a brother is really cool, I think. 

Was Mum naughty?

Yes, all the time.

Why? 

Take the 2nd exit onto Stirling Highway.

Hang on, just let me get into this traffic, it’s busy.

Trafficky.

Hey! You just made up a word. Trafficky. I love it. Traffic is trafficky. Excellent.

CHCHCH … right lane on Roe’s out.

CHCHCH … what the fuck is it now.

CHCHCH … some dickhead in a Sierra’s parked up with ‘is fucken hazard lights on.

CHCHCH … ahh ok mate, cheers … what a fuckwit. 

They’re swearing Nana Sarah, who’s swearing? 

It’s the truckies talking to each other on their radios. Sorry. But I like leaving the radios on, so I can hear what’s happening. It’s a bit different but sort of like music radio.

Stay in the left lane.

It’s like being on the telephone except everyone with a radio can hear what you’re talking about.

Can I make a call? On that radio thing?

Mmmm.

For the next 5 kilometres, stay in the left two lanes. 

Okay. But here’s the rules. Did you hear them talking about which lanes are safe to drive?

Yeah. 

So you can’t jam up the radio waves and carry on when they’re talking about stuff like that. You say what channel you’re on, like TV channels. These guys are talking on channel 40. So let’s practise first. Say your name and channel, Gracie. 

Grace reporting on channel 40 …

That’s brilliant! Okay, what are you gonna say next? 

Say hello if you can hear me?

Yep okay. That’s good. How do you sign off? 

What does that mean? 

It means how you finish the call. Say Grace over and out. That means you’ve finished speaking but you that want them to answer back.

Hi everyone, this is Grace reporting on channel 40 … I’m on my way home from school, if you hear this please say hello to me, Matilda on channel 40, Grace over and out. 

Pretty cool, Grace.

CHCHCH … 

No one is talking to me.

That's okay mate.

Take the next exit onto highway 3 to Victoria Park, Sealane Avenue.

I’m not sposed to know where I live, Nanna Sarah. Is this machine going to tell me where I live?

It’s okay. I’ll stop the directions before we get there so you don’t hear it.

CHCHCH … 

Why didn’t they answer my call Nanna Sarah?

They’re probably busy. Hang on, I’ve just gotta do this thing. mutters fuck this city thing stresses me out.

Take the exit.

 

***

Grace reporting on channel 40. Hope you had a good weekend. Today at school we did our maths test. Please say hello. Grace out.

CHCHCH … Heeeelllooo Grace!

Someone said hello!

Yes someone did!

CHCHCH Hello Grace!

CHCHCH That fucken dickhead doin’ 50 northbound I can’t fucken believe it what a dickwad.

CHCHCH I’m having chips for dinner, mate. Jacks n chips.

CHCHCH Mate I hear you.

CHCHCH Hello Grace! 

Nanna Sarah, what was my Mum like at school? Was she good at sport?

Your mum was hopeless at sport. 

I’m good at sport. What colour was her hair?

Brown.

What colour was her eyes?

You know that. They were blue and now they’re green.

My brother’s eyes are blue.

Yeah. All babies are born with blue eyes. Did you know that?

His eyes might turn brown.

Yes they might do.

His Dad’s eyes are brown.

Yes. Yes they are.

My Dad’s taller than you, Nanna Sarah.

No he’s not. 

Dad wants to know if you still have big frizzy hair. He says your frizzy hair makes you look bigger than him but he’s really bigger in real life. That’s not true, is it?

I’m taller than your Dad, Gracie. I don’t care what he says.

At the next exit, take highway 3 to Victoria Park.  

Can you turn off that machine please, Nanna Sarah?

No worries love. I’m getting better at this city thing. 

Does your frizzy hair really make you bigger than my Dad?

Not really. I dunno.

CHCHCH … southbound on Stirling shit’s happening up ahead.

 ***

Hi Gracie!

Nanna Sarah, here’s my NAPLAN test. Can I open it? 

No! No wait. Wait. I’ll ring your mum first and ask her.

But I’m such a good writer. This says my handwriting is bad. 

CHCHCH … it’s shit out there ay. There’s fucking dickheads about everywhere today. 

I’ve seen your handwriting. It’s really bloody good Gracie.

You just swore Nanna Sarah. 

Look, don’t pay any attention to this test. It’s rubbish Gracie. It’s not real. It’s not real! 

But it says, look here … 

Hey. What are you going to call in today?

Hello everyone, this is Grace reporting on channel 40. I wrote a story about a mermaid called The Pearl Princess and it’s about to be turned into a movie, you can see it tonight on channel nine. Grace reporting, over and out. 

CHCHCH … that sounds like a good story Grace.

CHCHCH … we need to hear more like this, guys.

CHCHCH … yeah, we need more of this.

CHCHCH … just a reminder everyone, there’s kids like her listening in, please tone down the language.

CHCHCH … Copy that.

CHCHCH … Copy

Copy

Copy

Copy that.

*** 

Gracie, I’m leaving, I’m going back down south tomorrow. So this is your last call. What do you want to say today?

Proceed to the roundabout and take the 2ndexit.

Hello, this is Grace reporting on channel 40. This is my last call to you all. If you hear me, please say hello and goodbye. Grace on channel 40, over and out.

That was pretty cool, Gracie. Really great.

CHCHCH … 

Grace! Heeelllooo! Goodbye!

Hi Grace and goodbye

Hello and Goodbye!

Bye Grace

Hi Grace, see you on the road mate.

Hi Grace Bye

Bye kid.

I’m waiting for the movie.

I think you are awesome Grace.

Thanks for being there for me, mate.

Keep on trucking, kid.

 

 

 

 

 

Problematic wilderness

 The western narrative around wilderness is so interesting. Those places of 'moral confusion and despair', where Moses wandered for decades, where Sir Orpheo abandoned himself into the wilds to search for Euridice, growing his hair long, communing with the birds (possibly consuming a few too), hoping to entice the fairy king with his lute song, only to see his beloved wife pass by one day while falconing, her forearms clad in leather gauntlets, as she disappeared between cleaves of granite. Does not bode well for a woman to fall asleep under the ympe tree at noon.

This of course is all ancient history. 'For the Pharaoh will say of the children of Israel, they are entangled in the land, the wilderness hath shut them in.' (1) There is another quite famous couple who were driven from the garden to a harsh wilderness as punishment. In western lore, the deep forested wildernesses were home to wolves and witches; only woodsmen, hunters and abandoned children dared to enter the depths, where the trees sucked out the light. In Richard Powers' The Overstory, he writes a forest scientist Patricia Westerman walking through the thick forest to a clearing, where she thinks that these light-bathed circles 'make a reasoned argument to the loggers'. Emerging from deep karri forest undergrowth into the mossy, lichened open space of a granite cap gives me a familiar sense of psychological relief. The light, the space, the opening sky.

Millennia or centuries later, and right in the thick of the colonial project, along came the Romantics who made wilderness sexy by sublime.

 In Australia, the wilderness was still depicted by colonial artists and writers as a place of foreboding, of impenetrable forests and harsh interiors, peopled with Indigenous silences, malevolent swagmen and lost children.

 (2)

At around the same time in the Americas, the frontiers receded into rural domesticity, prompting books such as The Call of the Wild and countless Westerns. The Romantics and early environmentalists of the Americas claimed that the wild, sublime places allowed us to be closer to God. 'I'd rather be sitting on a mountain top and thinking of God, than in a church thinking of the mountain,' wrote John Muir. So the narrative flipped from wilderness flipped from being a place of purgatory and devilry, to a place with which a man (and yes, let's do that shall we?) can commune with God. The language of false idolatry, transgression and greed that originally condemned those exiled to the wilderness was now turned on those who sought to dam it or destroy its forests: 'Vandalism.' 'Desecration'.

These days the wild places are described in tourist brochures as 'untouched' and 'pristine'. Structures are built over the granites to give visitors an engineered sense of that sublime but perfectly safe near-death experience. 'Core Wilderness Values' can be almost virtue judgements which mean the difference between being protected and simply 'managed'. 

We all know that untouched wilderness is a crock during an epoch of climate change and ecological breakdown but calling a place untouched wilderness can also define it as a place empty of human beings; that as separate beings from flora and fauna, true wilderness can only exist without the human stain. And this, to me, is where the problem with wilderness starts getting pretty weird.

Advertising wilderness as pristine and untouched appeals to history's erasure. The removal of First Nations people around the world during the 19th century created 'uninhabited wildernesses' at precisely the same time as Muir was arguing for the Yellowstone National Park and the Australian John Mitchell called for a national park in the Nornalup area. 'There is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. It is entirely a creation of the culture which holds it dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny.'(3)

 And then, back to the fall, as Cronon writes, 'If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature in nature represents its fall.'

1. Exodus, King James Version.

2. Hanging Rock, with ceremonial dance (look closer!)

3. Cronon, W. 'The Trouble With Wilderness or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature', Environmental History, 1995.

4. https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2...

Purest Potential

I've just had a new baby grandie, a boy. Here are his feet resting on my hand. Look at those toes!

 He's 24 hours old in this picture. 24.Hours.Old. 

 

Kangaroo politics

We've had this old boomer hanging around the house lately. I wrote a post about him chasing the dog along the bottom track. She's also bailed him up in the bush between the house and the inlet. It seems he hangs out in this liminal zone. When I first saw them together, the dog was howling at him and he had up his boxing paws and neither animal could work out who had the upper hand. Every time I've seen them together, they are trying to negotiate power structures and kinda failing.

Sometimes, early in the morning before I get out of bed but after light has filled the house, I can hear the splashing of an animal crashing through the shallow waters of the inlet. Experience tells me it is my dog chasing that boomer roo into the water. I'll put on my boots and run down to the shore, call her back. I'll see her swimming in circles around the old man kangaroo, who is sitting low in the water with just his head emerged. And she'll come back, my dog, shaking the briny from her hackles.

Anecdotes swarm of kangaroos that lead dogs into dams, swamps and rivers, and then drown them once the dogs are out of their depth. People I know have told me of this very occurrence, of seeing it happen right in front of them and not being able to do a thing. It seems my dog and this old boomer have a relationship that I don't totally understand. I've been so worried about what might happen when I go to work, leaving my dog at home. I'm worried that I'll find her dead or drowned on the shore, or that this bush dog has gone one step too far and killed the old boy.

A neighbour had a chat with me on the beach the other day (yes I have a neighbour now). Apparently he's seen this same old boomer walk out into the water and sink down, so that just his snout is showing above the water line. 'I've never seen anything like it,' he said. 'Maybe he's trying to get rid of ticks?'

'So my dog wasn't chasing him in?'

'Nope.'

'Right.'