Life Discoveries # 2 - Landscape

19 July 2019        

    That thing I did the other week – about Life Discoveries – did it trigger anything? - helped you recognise that you had an equivalent first cultural discovery, one that reacted with your basic inherited traits and so influenced the development of the person you became? Maybe it was....

       Warrior? - you arrived with the Warrior Gene (it exists they say) and right from the get-go you were into Cops & Robbers or GI Joe. Couldn't wait to be a Marine or a Firefighter.

       Sport? - some kids pick up a football or a golf club or put on a pair of runners and they're OFF. Finish up being an Olympian. Hate to lose.

       Art? - you could draw like Monet at the age of 6. (Geez I would loved to have had that one).

       Craft? - always making stuff, clever with your hands. Started doing macramé at 2.

       Parenting? - mothered the cat or any kid a year younger than yourself. Good with bandages.

       Nature? - adopted lizards, rats, grasshoppers, planted stuff, became a Vet or a Park Ranger.

    There's heaps more but you get the idea.

    So, for me, at Number 2 it’s “Landscape”.

    While “Wheels” largely faded as an all-consuming interest by my early 30s, my love of landscape never has. And, like Wheels, my Dad was also afflicted with this one. So maybe it's inherited after all. Initially I thought it was “Nature & Landscape”, but after thinking about it I reckon I was most deeply affected by just the landscape part. Nature's great arena.

    I might have been born out in the bush, but I was a city kid from about 3 to 7 years old, trams and picture theatres and walking to school on bitumen footpaths, shops up the street, suburban houses cheek by jowl. Then at 7 (about 1946) suddenly my environment changed. We moved up into the hills, Mum and step-dad making a fresh start. I (we all did) took to it like the proverbial duck.

     Our house was a sturdy old stone place, plain and square, rainwater tanks, classic outhouse up the back, and set in a fold in the hills about 2kms from the nearest neighbour. It was built in the early 1920s just after they put the road through this part of the ranges, a road that had to be blasted from about 7kms of hard-rock gorges, clinging to the line of the river.

    In the '20s and '30s the owners turned it into a popular stopping off place for fisher-folk and flappers and day trippers, put in a tennis court and a kiosk down by the road, did ice cream, coffee, and cream teas with their own blackberry jam (those creeks up the back of the place grew the world's best - and thorniest, trust me - blackberries). But by the time we moved in its glory days were gone, the kiosk was home to endless tunnels of termites and the tennis court had a creek cutting through one corner.

    But its big redeeming feature was that it was surrounded by Landscape! - creeks, a couple of small fields, hillsides and valleys thick with big gums, birdlife, rabbits, foxes, a snake or two, sheep, our one cow, a large cackle of chooks, and us. But best of all was the river. Well below road level, it was an explorer’s playground, back in those days when 10 year old kids could be trusted to have enough brains to work out for themselves what was dangerous.

     About a two kilometre stretch of the river was our 'territory', beginning on the upstream end with a citrus orchard, on one of those rich alluvial flats in a sweeping bend. It belonged to an uncle, who also owned everything else in sight, but he lived miles away up-river, which meant a steady supply of oranges in season. And there was a deep crystal clear pool below the orchard, edged by bulrushes thick with waterfowl, and overhung by a massive old willow, so hours could be spent stretched out on its branch, watching rainbow trout not take the bait.

     It ran shallow and fast after that, where every rock had a fat yabbie under it, and the banks grew the world's biggest earthworms, said to be trout's favourite bait by passing fishermen who always arrived with their own spade. But elder brother had his own method. He made a drum net (illegal he always claimed) and by some kind of magic the fish seemed to be fascinated by it, swam in and couldn't find their way out. So he said.

    Next was a really deep pool, but the water there was always in shade, so it was dark, and surrounded by reeds, and I was just a bit intimidated by it. Being told by elder brother (in the early years when I was still green and gullible!) that it could be bottomless actually didn't help. But this was where the magic must've been strongest, or the fish stupidest, as here is where his drum net worked best.

    On downstream the river went back to fast and rocky and shallow after that, but just deep enough to float a boat made of a dynamite box (stepdad worked in a quarry) with a four gallon drum strapped to each side. It floated for at least ten minutes. And geez that water was cold. No matter how hot the day was it was always bloody freezing!

     The river went under a road bridge near the end of "our" stretch, a classic old concrete single arch job with racks of swallows' nests up in its works, and made thunder-rumbles any time the rare car or truck went over. But on the other side the river opened out into a series of rocky pools in bright sunshine, some actually worn deep into the solid rock by a zillion years of water dynamics, a couple big enough to be plunge pools, the only warm-ish water in the river.

    Elder brother and I had to walk a couple of kms to school for the first year, rain or shine, snakes or no snakes, up through the scrub behind the milking shed, where we picked up an old bullock track hacked across the face of the steeper hills, used long ago by the timber-getters. And up there we went past a spot where bushrangers kept their stolen cattle (yep, so I was told), to open out on the top of the range through apple orchards (dee-licious!), then picked up a dirt road to a one-room school that had one teacher and seven rows of desks, one row for each year. I re-walked this trail once, as an adult, and was surprised to see how steep and how rough it was, found it hard to imagine a seven year old and an eleven year old being allowed to do this today, but it was all just sort of – normal - back then.

    We switched to the once-a-day bus after that, when elder brother went on to High School, and me to a school down-river, where I teamed up with a bestie from the next valley, and together we discovered the gentle art of kissing girls, pinching watermelons, and smoking old horse manure crushed and rolled in newspaper. Geez we had to master the knack of making out we sucked in, without actually doing it as that stuff’d rip your bloody throat out!!

    One of the benefits of being well out of the city, was the sky at night. For me, standing out in the dark on a clear moonless night became a favourite thing. It was all so - deep! – deep and thick with the Milky Way. God it was beautiful. And I wouldn't go in till I'd spotted at least one shooting star. They were brilliant. And it felt like you were more than just "outside", it was like there was no roof! And it still feels like that, any time I'm out in a big open landscape - aaaah, the roof is off!

    In the 5 years we up there, I ranged far and wide, revelling in the freedom and the sense of adventure - there was an old gold mine over the back of one range - rockslides sometimes blocked the "main" road and the bus had to take an old "switchback" - and once a woman with seven kids in tow arrived on a horse and dray and took over an old "Depression" shack on the other side of the road, but disappeared again a few months later. Then there was the time I set fire to the school scrub - ah, but that's another story.

     So, that's a glimpse into what instilled in me a love of Landscape, one that has helped shape me, and has never diminished. To this day I can close my eyes and walk every inch of that place, that not only etched itself onto my personality, but gave me more story material than I'll ever be able to use.

    There's a bit of a sad post-script to this - that entire landscape of my boy days went under a massive dam wall and reservoir in the late '60s - house, river, bridge, creeks, road, trees, memories. Drowned the lot. Ah, that’s Progress.

    But, the thing is – this love of Landscape that it gave me has never left. It’s simply part of who I am. More than that, there’s only two things that waken my God-given spirit and makes it truly fly – it’s when I write, and it’s when I’m out in places that have no roof, whether it’s the Australian outback, the Kerry hills, the mountains of Wester Ross, or the beaches of Northumberland. That’s when I become re-connected. And whole again.

    Cheers...

        T.R.E.

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