Anne Collins - My Friends This Landscape

My Friends This Landscape

ISBN 978 1 76041 600 3

Copyright text Anne Collins 2011

Cover from a photograph by Anne Collins

All rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the copyright holder. Requests for permission should be sent to the publisher at the address below.

First published 2011

Reprinted 2018

Ginninderra Press

PO Box 3461 Port Adelaide 5015

www.ginninderrapress.com.au

I nestle into this house owned by Parks at Cockle Creek, it is late afternoon. Sitting on the arm of the chair near the window, my eyes follow the shoreline along the south-eastern corner of Rocky Bay to the sculpture of the Southern Right Whale calf. From here it looks like a kangaroo in mid-hop. Close to shore a small boat with a mast is turning around in the wind. In the foreground a sign on the grassy verge indicates Private Residence 839. It refers to the old, low-slung cottage next to it, but this dwelling is not in my line of vision nor in my imagination. Instead I see sign, boat and water.

At the far end of the beach on the other side of the bridge, near the entrance to Cockle Creek, another sign nailed to a jetty instructs Private Do Not Use. You can walk onto the rocks that the structure is attached to, but not the jetty itself, left most of the time unused and weathered by the wind and the salt water. This do not use exclusivity stands absurdly exposed in such vast, wild space. Meanwhile, the other piece of private property continues its graceful turns back and forth on the water. Campers arrive in the dimming light. At my back a south-westerly gale is on its way.

This is the island of wind chorus. Inside I watch dark trees dance to the winds night tune. I am glad for the warm fire and my pot of soup on the stove. This is a place of testing strength and weakness cant have a chorus of trees without a wind at your back pushing you along, the wild romance out there full of rain and temper-tantrum squall, full of itself, raging around, owning the place. This is one kind of night, perhaps like the one described by Labillardire and his crew, but unlike them Im not huddled on the bank of the South Cape Rivulet in the soaking rain.

This is a listening kind of night. A gale stirs up its own dread, reminds you doesnt it? of ones ultimate, solitary task. Id rather be alone here than alone in a city full of people. Theres news that another friend is dying. A gale tells you that youre not always in charge. This Cockle Creek place once held me in its grip. I can hold it better in my imagination than out there where the wind conducts the proceedings, where the gale stirs up all that is mostly kept in place.

Living the night. Take your cue from the sound of the wind. Tree shadows lurch. I research memory here near Recherche Bay on the edge of candlelit history. I forget to speak, remember who I am, who you are, beyond all the details that keep us too often on the move. Living the night.

Researching memory: I remember the large trees along Planters Beach. So many are now dead. And an old green cottage by the pines instead of the two modern houses now hooked up to satellite dishes. Memory collides with reality, yet our lives are reduced to memory, shaped by it; memory becomes us, fiction flatters fact.

Walking along that stretch sectioned into five beaches, you are now asked to respect the hooded plovers, to leave the shells and seaweed on the sand. Collecting cockles is no longer allowed its public property not for the taking. Then from the last beach you enter a woven tunnel of tea-tree on the way to Fishers Point, its fairy-story path soft and spongy underfoot, leading irresistibly onwards to the whitest of light at the end. Ferns and mosses decorate its edge with splashes of green, while the curved lines of cutting grass bunch in to the side. On a hot day you would linger in the cool here.

I remember we camped at Boltons Green and strolled along these shores at Rocky Bay, the breeze caressing our salty skins. Our equipment was basic but a summers day and the stretch of white sand made it easy. My trusting, youthful glee at all this beauty made me carefree. I had a hazy, intense attraction to the natural landscape. I still do. Like Labillardire I am filled with admiration. Perhaps my Celtic ancestry feeds this response to the natural world. But as I was soon to discover, beauty can be terrifying. My first walk to South-East Cape in the mid-1980s turned me in on myself and steered my imagination to the brink of control.

By morning the wind has died down and I imagine those campers coming out of a wet, howling night. As the light changes a group of surfers go off with their boards to ride the big southern waves. Fury has taken her rage elsewhere. A spot of sun through the trees pretties the day. Come out, it urges. I emerge to recherche past impressions, at the centre of which is a memory of power.

I dont remember going to Fishers Point before, or being aware of it. On the way there I pass two people walking so effortlessly, they seem to be floating. Our greeting is genuine, three human beings adrift in this openness. I am moved by his unassuming smile, his young face, his long dreadlocks gnarled like the trees behind us. She is more tentative, as we women often are; her mouth smiles, her eyes assess the moment. Tears well up to the rims of my eyes and I view the world through a watery lens, hear the sound of lapping at my feet: the greeting is genuine.

The rocks on the way to Fishers Point are crawling with fat skinks. My feet disturb their sun-baking and they dart for cover. Another surfer passes me in a hurry to reach the waves around the corner. Focused on the sea, he doesnt want to know I am here. Our eyes do not meet. In the distance his companions bob about in the swell like pieces of kelp. I think of my brother, a surfer in a hurry to get through life, his death no risk, a calculation beyond limits.

At Fishers Point stand the ruins of an old hotel built by Captain Fisher in the nineteenth century. You can sense the dimensions of this building, the tawny brick-work suggesting an eye for pattern and colour, now offset by the greens and browns of the encroaching grasses and bush. Nature reclaims its own, we are not here forever. Remnants of an old garden feature a cluster of fuchsia and a line of fern that perhaps bordered a pathway. This hotel would have tasted salt, its fires would have warmed and fed the hardened whalers drunk and cursing on the inside, full of masculine noise and brash certainty now lost to silence. The sea and wind have turned the building into a kind of Escher-like structure where notions of space and boundary tease our perceptions.