A morning in the wildness of the park

This morning I walked and photographed from before dawn in Centennial Park, a haven in the middle of Sydney's busy Eastern Suburbs.

I'm reminded now of Robert MacFarlane's statement in his wonderful recent book The Wild Places:

... I had learned to see another type of wildness, to which I had been blind: the wildness of natural life, the sheer force of ongoing natural existence, vigorous and chaotic. This wildness was not about asperity, but about luxuriance, vitality, fun. The weed thrusting through a crack in a pavement, the tree root impudently cracking a carapace of tarmac: these are wild signs, as much as the storm wave and the snowflake.

It's good to be reminded that we can experience wildness in the heart of our city, and not think of this as less than the wildness that is "out there" in the Australian bush.

Some images from this morning:



MacFarlane goes on to say:

I had come to see wildness as a quality that flared into futurity, as well as reverberating out of the past. The contemporary threats to the wild were multiple, and severe. But they were also temporary. The wild prefaced us, and it will outlive us. Human culture will pass, given time, of which there is a sufficiency.

There's a sign in the park that reminds visitors that the ponds drain large volumes of rainfall from suburbs such as Bondi Junction through the Botany Aquifer to Botany Bay, via a complex system of streams, drains, and groundwater flows. And there's good evidence that in the Northern parts of the Aquifer at least, the sandstone filtration produces water quality better than that coming out of our taps. It's encouraging that a wild system system can maintain its health in one of the most densely populated areas of Australia.

And finally, a poem relating to Centennial Park that I wrote last year:

the way we walked

we could feel it in our bodies,
had already slipped into our mythology –

the gravel path, the darkening sky
the swamphen strutting on the lilies –

how the green leaves gorged the lagoon
how rain fell upon them, drumming

how we attended to the beats
saw flashes in the west

saw the swamphen, purple
moving over the extent

Occupied territory of another sort

Australia's ACT (the Australian Capital Territory) strikes me as a powerfully symbolic territory (of a different sort to Winton's territory occupied by the ratepayer) and one that has a place in our collective psychic life.

This fact has not been lost, of course, on the original inhabitants of this land, who for 36 years have resiliently maintained the Aboriginal Tent Embassy near old Parliament House, and right on the Griffin land axis.

The Griffins delineated a land axis, aligned with the summits of four local mountains. It went from Mount Ainslie to Mount Bimberi in the Brindabellas, passing through Camp Hill and Kurrajong. Crossing this at right angles was a water axis along the river, which in the plan became a chain of ornamental basins. By integrating the site’s topography with their design, the Griffins presented the site itself as a symbol ‘of a democratic national identity’ (Vernon, 2002). (The Ideal City)

I found the Griffins' land and water axes to be palpably powerful, on a beating hot New Year's Eve walk that we took last year, past some of the war memorials of Anzac Parade.

Hot letters on the Australian Service Nurses National Memorial:

A shimmering Royal Australian Air Force Memorial, also hot to the touch:

There seem to be many rich layers of land and water "markings" at play in these axes, several cruciform incisions at the heart of our democratic system, overlayed with the complexities of histories and current-day relationships between indigenous and "imported" cultures.

Dispossession is the shadow side of this occupation of territory in such a grand way - I was drawn to this in my poem on the land axis.

on the land axis

dispossession strikes a chord with me –

you want to make this place
eucalyptic

have set your gunyas
here on the levelled lawns

let in long summer evenings
the smokes of your dreamings
mingle with the scents of roses –

me, going from door to door
looking for what's been lacking –

returning, in the end
to the little timbers
the jetty, watching the meteorite

that falls and boils its way
into the churning sea

There are also some thoughts on Canberra in canberra, new year's eve.

canberra, new year's eve

the big lamps hover
in ceremonial attendance
over the wide empty way

the avenue, the monuments, the dry leaf-strewn earth
vent the day’s heavy heat

at the nurses’ memorial
they touch cast letters –
A for australia’s like a small body
exuding body heat

at the air force shrine
bright steel’s hot to touch,
bronze searing

over at vietnam
a quiet thermal outpouring’s going on
while three pink and greys
haggle noisily

korea’s faired best –
granite and stones having reflected
much of the day’s onslaught –

three bright-metal conscripts
standing fresh and prepared
like sentinels for an evacuated city

the inhabitants having made
other plans for the evening

Energies can potentially be evoked by such national symbols on this grand scale - something I was attempting to consider in some recent linocuts (especially meteors over a field and meteor falling on a slope) - perhaps there can be a redemption for Winton's youths suffering the occupation of the ratepayer; a potentially more inclusive and energised life for them, rather than one of social and cultural marginalisation.

And I had in mind in my figure on a land/water axis linocut (at recent linocuts) a figure in touch with some kinds of ceremonial or "knowledge-based" markings in the land and/or water.

The monaro, drought 2006

Recently, some photos I took in the Monaro region of NSW in 2006 have been coming back to me - I suppose because the header image in this new blog has an image I also took in the Monaro.

The drought was 10 years old in 2006. Here are some images:



My poem seven crows was influenced by driving around Monaro dirt roads at that time, to take photos, as were some small paintings.

seven crows

seven crows inhabiting the night
seek the taste of black meat

harry the river of indifference
that flows like cold lava from the south

with the crows

from the bleached stalks and dry lands
to gloat

having driven the inhabitants
who were once keen farmers

to muttering

shamed
that others may look at their blighted lands
and see their state of reduction

crying
do you want this bloody land
you can buy it from me

To finish, Judith Wright's poem The Cicadas starts out:

On yellow days in summer when the earth
presses like hands hardening the sown earth
into stillness, when after sunrise birds fall quiet
and streams sink in their beds and in silence meet...

Two poetic openings - Wright and Levertov

On the recent theme of openings, here are two wonderful poems. To me, both speak of the possibilities of opening ourselves to deeper, richer parts of ourselves, through encounters with the natural world.

The first is by Judith Wright:

Breath

I turned to the dark window;
outside were stars and frost.
My breath went out to the night,
shaped like a cloud or a mist.
Small and soulless ghost,
what was it my heart meant
that, watching the way you went,
it moved so under my breast?

And here is Denise Levertov's A Reward. This is a beautiful poem that was originally in her collection Evening Train.

A Reward

Tired and hungry, late in the day, impelled
to leave the house and search for what
might lift me back to what I had fallen away from,
I stood by the shore waiting.
I had walked in the silent woods:
the trees withdrew into their secrets.
Dusk was smoothing breadths of silk
over the lake, watery amethyst fading to gray.
Ducks were clustered in sleeping companies
afloat on their element as I was not
on mine. I turned homeward, unsatisfied.
But after a few steps, I paused, impelled again
to linger, to look North before nightfall — the expanse
of calm, of calming water, last wafts
of rose in the few high clouds.
And was rewarded:
the heron, unseen for weeks, came flying
widewinged toward me, settled
just offshore on his post,
took up his vigil.
If you ask
why this cleared a fog from my spirit,
I have no answer.

A Reward can now be found in Denise Levertov's New Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2003) and is reproduced here with the kind permission of Bloodaxe Books.

Gulaga

Descending Gulaga (Mount Dromedary) on the New South Wales far south coast. This was on our February trip to Mystery Bay and around.

Short article on Gulaga.

From my poem blue boat on a stormy sea:

...feeling the chill, descended
encountering things of a black shiny nature –

wriggling leaches
that we knocked from our shoes
and a snake that turned its back
slipped away into cover

Mystery bay

In February we spent ten days at Mystery Bay on the New South Wales far south coast. It's a beautiful area and I found writing there very pleasurable. Here's an evening image taken from the cottage we stayed in.

A poem that resulted:

the little ones

a flock
of tight knots

brown
gerygones

drubbing on
lathes of the decking

like rubber bullets
ricocheting

little fists
of children

each vector
of forces

arriving and
then leaving

empty

not as it was
before they came

but changed,
a stage

whereon the piece
took place

and the little
ones

moved on

And I find the image below a very hopeful one - approaching a rise on an open track, a soulful lifting and sense of space. The black cockatoos love this area, swaying in the banksias and strafing in flocks. Near the headland north of Mystery Bay, on the way to Corunna Lake.