Tim Winton's musings and meanderings: Island Home

 

I WANTED, very much, to like Tim Winton’s beautiful looking new book about Australian landscapes and Australian culture. I did enjoy aspects of it quite a lot. At other times I felt restless, like I was a bit stuck in a discussion he was creating, one that holds enormous meaning for him, but less significance for me and perhaps other readers. I didn’t feel this way when I read Robert Macfarlane’s latest book, the glorious ‘Landmarks.’ Yes, his was personal as well, but less like a diary, less egocentric in some way. They do have much in common, especially the enjoyment and exploration of naturalistic terminologies, for landscapes, birds, flowers and trees, especially.

The best parts of Winton’s book (probably like Macfarlane’s as well) was the beautiful detail. You can see this writing in other works of Winton’s, in his fiction. Perhaps not as lyrical as it is here though. I am thinking of ‘Cloudstreet’, and ‘The Turning’ in particular, my favourite works of his. Sometimes the prose is lyrical here, but often with a kind of contradictory brutal edge as well, and lots of colloquialisms and earthiness, the kind of language that Winton gets in trouble with for ‘intellectuals’ who might prefer Patrick White or David Malouf.

Here is a section from ‘Barefoot and Unhurried’- ‘So often a child’s reveries spring from rhythms present in nature: the lapping rise and fall of birds stirring, settling, stirring anew; the swoon and sweep of wild oats in the wind; cicadas counting off the day in a million disapproving clicks of the tongue…I used to lie in the sun and listen to the metronomic tick of blood beneath my temples. I remember how hypnotic the stroke of my newly mastered freestyle became. There was strange comfort in the hiss of the stick I trailed in the dirt all afternoon, and in my whispery footfalls on the empty beach.’

Wow. The stick and the footfalls. Some of the best sensory writing I have read this year.

Fishing, at Cape Keraudren in 1977, Winton lands an extraordinary fish that is ‘chrome-sleek’ and it escapes his clutches, but not before it coats him with mucus that he describes as an ‘adhesive slime.’ As a result he spends ‘half the hot night scraping the fish’s ectoplasmic smegma from my hands and shins.’ In the morning his ‘fingers are webbed.’ I can only imagine how much people like Ernest Hemingway and Ted Hughes would enjoy an experience like this.

 

Winton’s observational skills are extraordinary, more so than even Sylvia Plath with her Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbour’, and the crabs’ ‘glittery wisp and trickle’ in that particular poem. Here he is wandering at low tide, observing ‘thin strips of water’ busy with ‘crabs and fingerlings, spider stars, bivalves.’ Further on there are ‘wallows of skippers, the sandballs of ghost crabs and the mud-poots of worms.’ Winton notices- and to me this is extraordinary- how the beach ‘looks lifeless’, but in fact ‘pops and sighs and rattles.’

Seven years later, Winton is at Mitchell Plateau, and driving a LandCruiser across a rocky terrain. So, ‘…trundling blindly through the head high spear grass…’, Winton charts the extraordinary insect life he encounters as he rolls the window down: ‘As we mow down the wall of grass and vines, grasshoppers, moths, dragonflies and birds peel upward from it in vivid rushes. Bugs and grubs, mantises and spiders gather in our hair, sucking the perspiration on our faces, catching in the gaps in our teeth. The air is soupy. The whole plateau is choking with life and we chug against this mad plenitude like a boat in a sluggish, druggy sea.’

 

‘Soupy’, ‘choking’, ‘chug’, ‘sluggish’, ‘druggy.’ Winton having fun with words. These seem to me to be very Australian notions. This is one of any number of bits that celebrate the wildness of Australian life: ‘The thickness of the air. I have just returned from camping. Bushwalking in 35 degrees heat and being mauled like this by flies, some of them those awful heavy march flies, a runnel tunnelling across my face and into my ears, desperately thirsty, trying to suck down a bit of my sweat before I brush it away with a cruel, impatient swipe of my hand.’

Perhaps the strangest, and most pivotal, and mythical moment in his book, occurs in the chapter entitled ‘Cape Range, 2009.’ Winton is alone, looking for endangered rock-wallabies, and comes across a cave. Then there’s this: ‘The cave is the size of a child’s bedroom. Its rear wall is tawny where the ceaseless southerly has reamed it. When I see the roos folded down on their joints in the chalky dirt I give out a little squawk of surprise. But they did not stir. They lie curved against one another, pooled head to haunch in a rest that seems regal, even holy. I pause a few moments, taking it in. Then I step up and squat before them, peering closely. They really do look as if they’re sleeping. But their hides are translucent, like the vellum of medieval manuscripts.’ (192).

Their bodies, it seems, have been ‘mummified by the high desert air.’ Winton’s notions are very dreamy and romantic, but beautiful. The roos are ‘keeping vigil’, high up near the bluff, ‘even in death.’ All this is a world away from his vernacular style of many of his ‘characters.’

He also spends time discussing philosophical issues away from land and nature. Aboriginal issues and what it means to forcibly take ownership of land, and then what he calls ‘The Gallipoli Myth’, both explored in the chapter ‘Paying respect’: ‘…Anzac has been coarsened by the politics of political regression’ (a phrase that, for some reason, makes me think of John Howard); he refers to Gallipoli as a ‘bungled adventure’; images of the first war don’t conjure up ‘nationalistic charge’, but rather ‘tragedy and blind waste’; ‘a life squandered by jingoistic nonsense’; and then, on our fairly recent past, ‘…I feel ancestral shame for the dispossession of this country’s first peoples, shame for the despoliation of their lands and a kind of national shame, too, for the mess my nation helped create in Mesopotamia in recent years…’ This is about as far as you can get from the rhetoric of today’s far right, like Messrs Bolt and Abbott, and completely in tune with the Left, like Phillip Adams and others, who, incidentally, gave a lovely interview with Winton on Late Night Live recently. Winton also, as you might expect, offered a scathing critique of the major parties’ asylum seeker policy on the same programme.

I would love to have a similar attachment and reverence for the land and the sea, like Winton here, like Macfarlane is his beautiful books about Britain and elsewhere. Sometimes I feel I am getting close. Times like when it is dusk on the Great Ocean Road, and I am facing the black sea. Or driving along a winding path in autumn with its rivers of leaves (what Hopkins calls ‘wanwood leafmeal’). Then there was my first time in what has become the land of my heart. I was staying with friends, in winter, at Port Isaac in Cornwall. The little cottage was yellow and was called ‘Wave’s End.’ It was right on the harbour. I would race down, at dusk, bucketed and billowed by roaring winds. Down the cobbled hill, turn right, along an escarpment, down to the raging harbour, waves smashing onto the concrete path, next to an old rusted anchor. And just standing then facing the rising seas, feeling like an old Norseman, seeing the hills on either side, enriched and totally enchanted.

 

 

OUR STREET

 

I HAVE the misfortune to live in one of the most unfriendly streets in Melbourne. Sure, we know our neighbours on both sides, and they are both polite and have been in the house on the odd occasion and they are approachable and make you feel safe and offer you reassurance that they will help prevent burglary or arson of your property. However,

oh, there is the woman across the road who sometimes knocks on our door to bring food from the church, and she is comforting as well, and she doesn’t have to do this, and she seems to like us,

there is also the small matter of the people down the road a bit, on the corner opposite who run a small business, and work incredibly long hours and are never home. We visited once when we had the fanciful notion that we might get to know the people in our street when we purchased our house. We had a lovely time, they were in good spirits, I think it was around Christmas, at any rate a rare day off for them but I don’t think they have had a day off since, we never see them,

well anyway I walk up and down the street a lot to catch the bus that runs down the busy street at the end of our street. I walk up the street most mornings at about 7:30 and I walk down the street most nights around 5:00. I rarely see anyone. All the houses are like the houses in the Ray Bradbury story I’ve just read- The Pedestrian- where everyone is shut up inside watching television, and grass f=grows on the footpaths and there’s never a soul around because walking’s not the done thing to do,

and I know that people do still walk. I’ve seen this happen in other streets, even close by here. As I said I walk up and down a lot and never see anyone. Even worse, some of the paths are obscured because of low hanging branches from overgrown trees in people’s untidy backyards. There is rubbish on people’s lawns and cracks in the pavements and many of the houses have a kind of dishevelled look that doesn’t inspire confidence. And when there is no house with a jungle in the front yard and depressing overhanging branches, it’s an ugly block of flats that have sprung up everywhere like mushrooms and you can’t help but think of twenty or thirty closed doors instead of just one, and how people in the flats are probably suspicious of each other and have never been in each other’s lounge…

we have quite a wide street here, bookended at both ends by a busy road. We have, potentially, as the Irish might say, quite a grand spot. It could be a lovely street. As I said it is quite wide, and it is set back a bit from either end of the busy streets, and there are a few houses that are quite lovely to look at, the one next door in particular that should be heritage listed. But it is those damn front doors that are perpetually closed, those shutters that block out any light, those people on the other side who stick to themselves and don’t want to know you, or slip in and out like they worry they’re under some sort of surveillance. There are even kids across the road, and I’m not exaggerating if I say it seems like we’re invisible. There’s no curiosity, no warmth, no interest. You feel like ringing door bells to shake them out of their slumber. This is not what I bargained for. I dreamt. Of….

street parties. We all go to Dan Murphy around the corner. We congregate in the middle of the street and the police block off the road. Everyone wears some sort of funny hat and each of us has a book under our arm, or have a funny story to tell. There is a little microphone set up where you can share your story. People even sing, like they do in Ireland. Someone has a machine that’s got a backing track. You all belong. You all share something important. You are all members of the same street. You feel free, and comfortable, and you launch into ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, and the lovely woman across the road sings ‘You’re My World’, and the older one you know already from Lebanon knows some Lebanese music and that’s great, and the students you didn’t even know about are interested in the ARIA’s and you learn something new, and there’s even a Doors fan somewhere e=down the road, and you chat, just the two of you, for two hours about each other’s collection, and you are in a world of your own before you slip back into consciousness and get to know more kindred spirits, other people who have been transported mysteriously to your street just like you have. Towards the end of the night. No-one wants to leave. People pair off-

not in that sort of way. The ones who like poetry talk more in the encroaching shadows. There are two or three plumbers who promise to share each other’s tools, the two mechanics query each other over the size of their garage. Two men and two women from separate houses have all been jilted by somebody and never knew that they weren’t actually quite alone. Then there’s the kids. They might be friends for eternity. Any spare time they have in the future will be spent doing unfashionable things, like playing cricket or Cluedo, or ‘hit the gutter’ or four square at each other’s houses, and suddenly the iPad or the Nintendo will gather dust and won’t be used again. One day,

everyone will decide one street party every now and then isn’t enough, and these people won’t even feel they need to know anyone from the outside world. The houses are never sold, so none of them are turned into flats. Maybe, just maybe, the people in the existing flats might be invited. It might take years, but people will start trading and bartering and grow shared crops. Doors will remain open at all times. There will be no overgrown weeds and overhanging branches. Front fences will be torn down just because it is easier. And milestones and big news items will be shared and celebrated and there might be a big cricket match like the one in the novel ‘The Go Between’ and romances will occur, harmony maintained, and animals and birds will share the common humanity. Right now though,

I will wake up tomorrow, leave the house, the street will be silent and creepy, with not even a Boo Radley anywhere about, people will go about their business in the safety of their homes, those wandering about, few and far between, will have their heads bowed, and I will try one last time, because I can be incredibly patient, to catch the eye and smile at the guy who I see standing at the same bus stop every morning, catching the same bus.

 

A Place In Your Heart

‘YOUR street, rich street or poor

Used to always be sure, on your street

There’s a place in your heart, you know from the start

Can’t be complete outside of the street

Keep moving on through the joy and the pain

Sometimes you got to look back to the street again

Would you prefer all those castles in Spain

Or the view of the street from your window pane…’

VM (from Inarticulate Speech of the Heart)

 

Well, Reservoir is gone. Specifically, 50 Chauvel Street. I spent my final hours there the other night, with my parents, who were moving out the next day. In the end the lounge was filled with boxes and there was sparseness everywhere else where formerly there was clutter… and going back, children.

I first entered the white weatherboard house days after I was born in the now defunct PANCH hospital, in Preston, just a few miles away. Mother and father, and my sister and two brothers were already well acclimatised. I was to share a smallish room with G and J for the next 15 or 16 years, then just me and G for a while when J spread his wings. It was in this bedroom with my brothers where I lost most of my sight. I was on the bottom bunk, no lamp, with the main light mostly obscured, reading Enid Blyton and then Agatha Christie in the semi darkness. I have a feeling I continued to read when G put the light out. A weak yellow moonlight was my only guide. Until he left, J was on the other side of the room in a single bed. He must have still been there as an adult. I can remember him being at home well after he finished high school. G and I played a lot of word games, using the alphabet, well into the night. My only sister, C, was next door in a room of her own, and she would chime in through the walls. I can remember having difficulty sleeping. I would shake my head and send an enormous rattling of wood and bed springs from the end of the bed throughout the entire house. Mostly, people slept through it.

 

The next room along a narrow corridor from the two kids’ bedrooms was the kitchen, which led you out to the toilet and laundry, eventually to the back door. I have more memories of the kitchen than most of the rooms in the house. We had a green laminated table to place our food on. Always, it would be mother cooking. Minced meat would be squeezed through the manual blender to make cottage pie. Steamed vegetables. Little plastic animals attached to magnets on the metallic stove top. The tinned food cupboard. The drawer that housed the Glad Wrap and the rolling pin. The large curtained window that opened up to a vista of the expansive back yard. Venturing on entering the toilet by opening the closed door you would be greeted with a frantic ‘I’m in here!’

Most of us would eat at the table together in the kitchen. The forgotten conversations were probably about school. Father, however, usually after a long day at the fire brigade, or coming off night shifts, would be drinking in the lounge watching the news or ‘This Day Tonight.’ Mother would rap brusquely on the adjoining wall to let him know dinner was ready, and he would say he wasn’t ready, and his dinner would be placed in the still warm oven wrapped in alfoil for the next hour or two. Eventually he would walk in and say ‘Who can’t eat their tea?’

 

Mother and father slept in the large top bedroom, its window looking out onto the front street and the garden. Mother’s dressing table mirror was huge and we all pranced in front of it at some stage during our lives. Next door was the bathroom, and opposite this, the sliding doors into the lounge, the other oft frequented room in the house. Here were the cats on cold nights, sitting in front of the fire, and in latter days, heater. Gustave, Crystal, Snowy, Tiger, Penny- all had time there over the years. As is the case in most households, the lounge was the place to watch television. It was rarely switched off, besides a period early on when the room was dominated by a large billiard table. At some stage father bought a fancy Marantz stereo from a shop in Moonee Ponds. This provided hours upon hours of entertainment. I still remember buying Abbey Road from a shop at Northland, and playing it to death in the lounge. Countless Melanie and Moody Blues records were played on this stereo, all of these surpassed after the purchasing all The Doors records one by one, some of them imported presses from America, from Gaslight Records in Bourke Street. ‘Waiting For The Sun’, for example, was a real gem because it opened up inside with the lyrics to ‘Celebration of the Lizard.’

Although visiting Chauvel Street became a little grim at times towards the end, with its cracked tiles, worn carpet, flaking paint and dilapidated furniture, there are countless good memories. And that’s inside the house, not to mention the fun-filled experiences in the back yard playing soccer, and on the corner playing cricket. One of the best of these times was the ritual of Tuesday night visits that lasted for a while, after we had all moved out. J, G and I would join with mother and father for roast meals and we would compete in an exciting electricity of words, all of us with stories to share from our new found independent lives.

 

Opening out, to Reservoir itself, I think of all the lives I shared with neighbours and those close by. I still think of the Arbuckle’s and Luch and the Pretto’s in the same street, and from the adjoining streets, precious times shared over the years with Joe, Bob, Linda, Lisa, Michael, and others. Now, I don’t really have a reason to go to Reservoir. I don’t think there is anyone I know in Reservoir any more. There’s a place in my heart for my suburb, my street, and more specifically my home. But leaving it all behind is a part of life. We all have to grow.

 

Those wide wide open roads: Forbes, NSW September 2015

FORBES, MID-NSW, SEPTEMBER 21-24

It took us about nine hours to get there, and about nine hours to get back. But it was worth it. I love trips, no matter how short, and the different perspectives they can throw up. A new perspective, new horizons, a different interpretation.

J, S, M and I left Monday morning and stopped a few times. A town called Narranderra. Just before that Jerilderie, briefly. West Wyalong. Places along the Newell Highway. These were the towns of some note that I sort of found interesting in some way. I pretty soon found that it was the wide, wide streets that I thoroughly enjoyed.  It became a kind of theme of my holiday. The space and wideness of everything in the countryside. And by the time we reached Forbes, it felt like we really were in the countryside.

I have long neglected, in my mind, rural Victoria or NSW. Shamefully, I have been fixated on Europe, and in particular England, for too long. So it was so refreshing, these calm few days, to find fascination and enjoyment in new things much easier to grasp and experience. And I thought also of all those anonymous lives.

We arrived at our friends’ place around dusk. It had been quite a while since I had seen them. We knew small things about each other. They once lived near us in Melbourne, but their stay was short lived. Like many people, they went back to their families, their roots. I noticed straight away how delightful their children were. Three of theirs and two of ours, and our two matched two of theirs in age. They have what seems like a huge house. But I soon came to realise that everything is huge in the country, in Forbes. A walking tour of the garden is enough to wear you out. The rooms in the house all big and square. Two matching levels in size and a chunky double garage. It opened my eyes to the possibilities. In Melbourne, like most cities, by contrast, you have to sweat and toil for space. Here the wind flew through your hair and you strode open chested everywhere, instead of the usual squeezing single file.

We sat in the kitchen, and laughed, and talked of things to come.

Early the next morning we rose and outside I marvelled again at their wide, wide street. All exaggerated sizes. We drove down by the Lachlan River. I thought of the past. Forbes’ gold rush days. And parties and house boats of yesteryear all along the Lachlan. They all went off walking next to the rugby ground, and I went for a run. Down by the rail yard and then north of the town, up a hill and past the hospital. Running along the side of the wide streets and knowing nobody and feeling free in the cool breeze and the blank sunshine.

I arrived back at the rugby ground early, and tried to make friends with several pelicans who, though resting, all had one suspicious eye on me and retreated every time I passively advanced. I wondered about potential maltreatment and bored schoolboys. They weren’t to know I held them in high esteem.

After lunch at the ‘Mezzanine’, N gave us a glorious tour of the town. She knew everyone, which, although hardly surprising, was still interesting to see. ‘Hello’ to the woman in the dress shop, ‘hello’ to the women in the shoe shop, ‘hello’ to the myriad people shopping in the chemist. I quickly scribbled a p.c. to mother and father, and at last we reached Victoria Square. Victoria Square, Forbes. A thoroughly enchanting spot. There are many ‘squares’ around the world that I have yet to see, or know little of- Times Square, Hanover Square, Berkeley Square, Washington Square. I also think of enchanting little places in Europe where, in the middle of the city, you could sit and ponder for hours, and never get bored.

That beautiful fountain in the heart of Perugia. Traipsing along Charles Bridge, Prague. The Spanish Steps, Rome. Looking at the façade of Chartres Cathedral in France. Thinking of Vincent in the public gardens in Arles.

 I wanted to stay in Victoria Square for hours. The pretty façade of the little buildings along the west side of the square and the impressive court house. The charming fountain in the middle and the solemn war memorial monument. The grandiose Town Hall and the pretty Anglican church along the east side of the gardens. Here time stands still and offers the town so much beauty and character. It is always the ‘old part’ of places that are the most rich and intriguing.

More people for N to recognise on the streets. After a while we all have a casual swagger of feeling free and unintimidated by everything around us. M wants to run across the road. We play ‘games’ and take lots of photos in the shops, pretending to be mannequins.

Later, for a complete change of scenery, we venture out to our hosts’ relatives, and drive along partially unmade roads to mysterious places filled with unknown lives and rich tapestries of history. N and T apparently got married in this tiny innocuous Catholic Church in this spot surrounded by empty fields. The relatives live on acres and acres of dusty ground. There are fences to be unlatched and latched, several of them, and people and dogs and sheds at the end of everything. Here, the relatives have hired sheep shearers, who cut away fantastically well at the stiff, mute sheep who surrender their will to these expert workers. After only a few minutes each, the sheep are reduced drastically in size, bundled down a chute to their relative freedom, and their new, white glistening bodies resume their harmless eating.

We meander inside for some lovely hospitality at the farmhouse, several acres away. To own all this acreage makes my head spin a little. There is a lot I would like to know, but I feel a bit intimidated by everything I don’t know, and everything I didn’t know that I don’t know. There are family stories amidst shearing talk. One relative comes from Coff’s Harbour, but it’s a different world. I don’t really know anything about this place or where it is. Suddenly, living in the northern suburbs of Melbourne for so much of my life, feels somehow ridiculously foolish. It’s a bit like when T talks to me. I haven’t really had conversations like this for years. I suppose it is a bit like rural talk that’s unfamiliar, but it is life talk as well, or life experience, and I get this sense of overwhelming naivety.

That night we drink well and go to bed late. We gorge ourselves on homemade pizza. I am really enjoying the company of the children. They are all unique in some way, somehow refreshingly different. My girls, the city type, are equally entranced. It is great to see M so charmed by D, both of them around 7. And S equally fascinated by the rural S. My S copies a lot of her moves. The rural S is always stretching like ballerinas do.

We take two cars in the morning. I go with T in his car, with a couple of kids engrossed by a film in the back, and J goes with N and another couple of kids. Dubbo seems a long way away. We drive through canola field after canola field, all bright yellow like shorn sunflowers. There is also a gold quarry. Again, T is a fountain of knowledge. I have never had the conversation steered away from my comfort zone so much for a long time, but it is good.

Dubbo Zoo, the sign says, is the premier tourist attraction of Australia. I’m unsure but it’s an interesting place. The animals, mostly African in origin, seem a long way away. But it’s a respectful distance, and for that we should all be glad. At other zoos, you always get the feeling people want to reach out and grab and paw and smear over the animals. Here, we gaze on respectfully and curiously, something you would never do with paintings at an art gallery.

T is very relaxed. Even before we get out of there, after a long day of gazing into distances, he allows the children a final play on the flying fox near the exit. It makes me wonder if I am too impatient at times. The drive back is intriguing for me. I am starting to think about it all ending, like I did at Sarsfield nr Bairnsdale on another recent holiday. Thinking about it ending, regretfully. The wide open vistas are still somehow intriguing.  I am still not tired of the differences, to ordinary life.

For me, then, one of the most moving experiences of the whole holiday occurs. Thankfully, T is in no hurry to get home. We visit Forbes cemetery, and finally find Kate Kelly’s sad little grave. We have S and S running around looking for it too. It is a sad, little forlorn grave, a little headstone all in white. I don’t know much about her, but I can sense her hardship in my bones and seeing the gravestone fills me somehow with curiosity and tenderness for her. She felt it, apparently, quite difficult, being Ned and Dan’s sister. One day, possibly drunk, at the tender age of 36, she was found, drowned, in a Forbes field not far from T and N’s house. Or maybe she was trying to save an aboriginal child. We don’t really know.

This night, our last, we have pasta, and then follows another late night for the children. We are all in the mood for dancing and costumes and concerts. S and T do a nice little duet about fathers and daughters. D and I do a kind of shuffle to Salif Kieta’s ‘Yamore’, Forbes S does some ballet, Melbourne S and M do their respective dances, and it is difficult to get little I off the dance floor. She keeps saying ‘not finished!’, despite each song coming to its natural end.

We leave, fairly early, on the last day, September 24. Appreciative hugs all ‘round. I must be inspired, because all the way home I continue to find each town lovely in its own way, never getting tired of those magical wide, wide streets. I discover that Evonne Goolagong grew up near Narrandera. I see that people along those wide streets are friendly and community minded, like you would expect. There is a huge man-made strawberry out near Finley somewhere where we take a photo next to two nervous caged rams. Tocumwal is charming (I missed it, asleep, the first time). Before this, at Narrandera again, M and I sit on the ground in the cool sunshine on a corner waiting for J and S shopping, me asking her if she likes the wide streets and if she would like to live in the country.

Before too long- well, after nine hours, in fact, we have wended our way towards the city again, in the ever encroaching dusk. It’s all too familiar again- talk of AFL football on the radio, slimmer streets, hurly burly of cars and traffic signs, ambulance, drab buildings and lots of tiny houses, each with their hard earned little allotments that are so, so un-Forbes like in their composition. And it’s not just the wide streets I already miss. Somehow it is also the dusty fields and the wild terrain and the long bitumen roads that can take you to these unknown and anonymous lives who seem down here to live in the middle of nowhere. There are dead kangaroos on the side of the road. Little farms dotted here and there and I’m glad to say that we all ventured to one of these.

Robert Macfarlane's LANDMARKS: an acute eye upon the natural world

I WAS at The Hill of Content bookshop in Bourke Street a while back, holding a precious book voucher in my hand, desperately looking to spend it wisely, hungry for a nourishing book, hoping to find an elusive good novel, having read a few dissatisfying ones in a row. Books that lacked something, that failed to ignite or charge the soul.

I saw ‘Landmarks’ on the shelf with the lovely blue cover design. The author is the British travel writer, Robert Macfarlane. I challenged myself to discover something new. A new approach to reading. Non-fiction, travel, landscapes, language, the natural world.

I dipped into it briefly before lights out. I thought about returning it. Am I going to enjoy this?

I dipped into it again the next night and read a whole chapter. Result? Hooked.

Part of the fascination is England and Scotland, two countries I love. Then there is the remoteness of the places visited, and how the idea of remoteness and paths scarcely travelled hold a fascination. Then there is the earnestness, and poetry in the writing. Then, as I discovered as I read on, so much more.

The first line of the book: ‘This is a book about the power of language.’ Macfarlane is a wordsmith, he loves language. He writes of the ‘astonishing lexis for landscape.’ There is a glossary of language at the end of each section. Local dialect for earth, waterlands, edgelands, underlands, woodlands- the list goes on. As fascinating and extensive these lists are, and this is a very valuable lexicon to have (one wonders how much he might enjoy a glossary of Australian aboriginal dialect), this isn’t the aspect which captured my imagination the most.

 

This is a book that contains so many interesting references and observations about the natural world, and done so poetically and intelligently, that you wish you had underlined, or at least placed a removable mark like a sticky label next to all those great expressions you encountered as you read along (I did do this once with the Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, the best text I have read that screamed out a need to do this.)

The best way to represent the joy of this book is with quotations.

1.     Quoting John Muir on the power of observation, ‘The surface of the ground, so dull and forbidding at first sight…(in fact) shines and sparkles with crystals: mica, hornblende, feldspar, quartz, tourmaline…the radiance in some places is so great as to be fairly dazzling.’ Macfarlane has clearly learnt from Muir when he finds involvement in the natural world right beside the upper Thames in Essex next to a power station (‘The Wilds of Essex’, BBC2).

2.     Quoting Nan Shepard (The Living Mountain): ‘Beech-bud sheaths, blown in tide-mark lines along the edge of the roads, give a glow of brightness to the dusty roads of May.’

3.     Quoting his (deceased)  friend Roger Deakin, (the) ‘park-bench green’ of a pheasant’s neck; a hornet ‘tubby, like a weekend footballer in a striped vest.’

4.     Quoting (birdwatcher) J A Baker, ‘Edney Wood was quiet but frighteningly beautiful. The sodden glow of the millions of leaves burnt my eyes. But after sunset it was just a desolate, deserted slum of trees.’

5.     Quoting Baker (again) on animals’ fear of man: ‘A poisoned crow, gaping and helplessly floundering in the grass, bright yellow foam bubbling from its throat, will dash itself up again and again on to the descending wall of air, if you try to catch it.’

6.     Quoting John Muir (on Silver Pines): ‘Colossal spires 200 feet in height waved like supple goldenrods chanting and bowing low as if in worship, while the whole mass of their long, tremulous foliage was kindled into one continuous blaze of white sun-fire.’

7.     Muir again, on observing the trousers of a fellow traveller: ‘…pine needles, thin flakes and fibers of bark, hair, mica scales and minute grains of quartz, hornblende, etc; feathers, seed wings, moth and butterfly wings, legs and antennae of innumerable insects…flower petals, pollen dust and indeed bits of all plants, animals and minerals of the region adhere to them and are safely imbedded.’

The book is a mixture of Macfarlane’s travels, his meetings of mutual admirers of the natural world, his tributes and reminiscences of former naturalists and landscape historians and various dictionaries or glossaries of landscapes, seascapes and weather.

One of the most interesting things for me has been to do some research, and look up the various obscure places in England and the United Kingdom that offer so much joy to this traveller and travellers of the past.

There is Brock Barrow, the Esk Valley and Muncaster Fell, the Rhinogs, the Wells of Dee, the Cairngorms… the list goes on. And it is endlessly fascinating to look these places up to discover their geographical location and wonder about the places that have provided writers with a sense of wonder.

It seems to me to be a wonderful thing to spend years on a book, filled with earnest research and plenty of first hand observation and experience, on such a topic as this, the fascination of the natural world. Macfarlane’s journey is full of respect as one’s pilgrimage to Mecca might be, or the places explored by a famous painter or photographer. Macfarlane is as careful with his language, beautifully poetic, as his mentors or heroes are, and as any poet or painter might be. One of the best chapters is about Roger Deakin, and his visit to Walnut Tree Farm. He calls Deakin a ‘water man’, and a ‘film-maker, environmentalist and writer.’ Deakin taught Macfarlane that one’s approach to open water should shift, from a place where one should fly over, drive around, or stop at, to one in which one should enter or explore. Macfarlane has the utmost respect for Deakin (and became his friend before Deakin died). Macfarlane especially enjoyed Deakin’s book ‘Waterlog.’ There must be people out there whose favourite book will become ‘Landmarks’, and hold the kind of genuine awe and respect for Macfarlane, that Macfarlane has for Deakin, and Nan Shepherd, Richard Skelton, Richard Jefferies, and John Muir, and many others.

 

The clip below is testament to Macfarlane's ability to discover natural beauty in the most unlikeliest of places.

 

 

The Heather Blazing : The Pleasures of East Gippsland Part 4

 

 

SARSFIELD NR BAIRNSDALE

JULY 11

THIS morning we decided to explore our surroundings properly in the glorious, weak sun. We saw kangaroos hopping along the western border fence last evening. We all headed out that way, opening gates. I ‘lost’ the others, preferring to wander alone in the deepest parts of the fields before the borderline. Surrounded by vast plains and heather blazing on the ground all about me, and large stretches of comforting emptiness on all sides, I wanted time to stand still. I thought about next week, and traffic, and shops, and fences and brick walls, and people and work and getting up early, and public transport, and fears and challenges and responsibilities, and I wanted time to stand still. I actually wanted time to stop. Right at that instant I felt the most free for a long time, then thought of Andrew Marvell’s refrain, which I learnt in Year 12:

‘But at my back I always hear,

Time's-winged chariot hurrying near.’

We renewed acquaintances with all of the charming creatures of the land. Sheep bursting to give birth and tiny new born lambs; the friendly and itchy black and white boar who is destined to have an unusually long life; the little pigs drowsy and pressed close to each other for warmth and comfort in their pen; ‘Boomer’ the border collie scampering around everywhere chasing our sticks; the black cows and the bull who invited us to get reasonably close to them but still keep a respectful distance; and finally the ducks and geese who are free range but act, timidly, like the ducks and geese back home at Coburg Lake.

Running adjacent to the road here sure beats running adjacent to Sydney Road back home. The gravel path next to the highway provided some softness. I made it to Bruthen just as the rest of the family pulled up in their car. Good timing.

We called in at the lovely Bruthen pub as we did a few years ago and talked to the lady at the bar about local wineries. Nicholson River wines off Duncan Road were lovely- well, the reds at any rate which is what we tried.

I have started thinking about how much S has changed. More so than A. She is wearing jeans all of a sudden after espousing derision towards them all this time. She is wandering off on her own a lot, running ahead and wanting to be independent. She wants to try all these new things. And as we drive, she has been looking ahead reading the roadway signs as they emerge, which is what I think I once did.

Our trip is almost finished. It is, of course, inevitable, and in lots of ways regrettable.