Klaus Hueneke - Exploring a Wild Australian Coast: On the South Coast of New South Wales

Exploring a Wild Australian Coast

Durras Forest behind Pretty Beach.

Exploring a Wild Australian Coast

On the South Coast of NSW

Klaus Hueneke

Seaweed holdfasts.

ROSENBERG

Dedication

For my mother Klara (19101991) who would often raise her arms to the morning sun, exclaim about the bright full moon or ask What bird is that?

For my father Walter (19101994) who had the courage and optimism to ship us to sunny Australia, tootle about in a Kombi and import a Klepper kayak.

First published in Australia in 2014

by Rosenberg Publishing Pty Ltd

PO Box 6125, Dural Delivery Centre NSW 2158

Phone: 61 2 9654 1502 Fax: 61 2 9654 1338

Email:

Web: www.rosenbergpub.com.au

Copyright Klaus Hueneke 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher in writing.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Author: Hueneke, Klaus, 1944- author.

Title: Exploring a wild Australian coast : on the south coast of New South Wales /Klaus Hueneke.

ISBN: 9781925078299 (paperback)

ISBN: 9781925078442 (Epdf)

ISBN: 9781925078459 (Epub)

Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Subjects: Natural history New South Wale South Coast.

South Coast (N.S.W.) Description and travel.

Dewey Number: 919.447

Illustrations and photographs by the author

Cover photos, front: Late afternoon sun piercing through Australia Rock at Narooma.

Back cover: The author (aged 70) at Mimosa Rocks in 2014.

Set in Arno Pro

Printed in China by Prolong Press Limited

Contents

Acknowledgments

Thanks and gratitude to:

My wife Patricia, Abigail and Mark Curtis, my sister Erika, Graham Scully (who has supported my work for twenty-five years and said, We were the midwives, you gave birth), Brian Slee, Mark OConnor (poetry), Pauline Downing, Annette and Dean Turner, Jack Palmer, Tracy McHardie, Rosemary Curry, Luci and Kim Knight, Damian and Renai De Marco, Gerry Jacobson (tanka poems), Rachel Colombo (poetry), David and Pennie Briese, and all the unknown people I spoke to, observed in my travels or whose books and articles I read.

I tried to find Max Jeffreys, author of the excellent book about the men of the Sydney Cove, in various phone books and wrote to him at New Holland, but got no reply.

Other books by Klaus Hueneke

Beyond the Cotter with Alan Mortlock (1979)

Huts of the High Country (1982)

Kiandra to Kosciusko (1987)

Kosciusko: Where the Ice-Trees Burn (1990)

People of the Australian High Country (1994)

Tilting at Snowgums with Mark OConnor (1996)

One Step at a Time (1998)

Huts in the Victorian Alps (2004)

Mountain Landscapes and Historic Huts (2006)

A String of Pearls: Photos of the South Coast (2011)

Purpose in life

My calling is to explore, record, listen and read, then digest it before letting it flow back into the community as articles, photographs and books.

Quartz rock sees and hears everything.

Part 1

Introduction

For thirty years I travelled on skis, on foot and in various homes on wheels, over, through, into and around the Australian high country. These little expeditions resulted in eight books as well as many articles and photo essays. All along and unbeknown to most of my readers I was exploring a parallel universe on the South Coast of New South Wales. Down there I swapped knickerbockers for Speedos and touring skis for kayaks. Instead of gliding down precipitous slopes I slid down breaking green waves. Instead of wearing a down duvet I wore next to nothing and sometimes even that (Oh Dad, youre so embarrassing!). Instead of being in raptures about ice-encrusted snow gums I came to revere lofty spotted gums and gnarly old man banksias. I made notes on anything I could lay my hands on map edges, notebooks, flattened food cartons and the margins of books. At home I consulted a small reference library, added snippets gleaned online and combined this with quotes, comments and poetry from other writers and friends. One day I thought, thats enough, its time to find a publisher. In time, with help from Kim Knight, I did.

The coast early impressions

In Germany as a boy and in Australia as a man Ive lived away from the sea. Going to it, whether it was the Baltic, the Tasman or the Pacific, was an escape from the familiar and an adventure into the unpredictable and unknown. From Bremen, my older sister and I caught a slow train across northern Germany and camped by the sea near Lbeck. From Orange, my parents, siblings and I crossed the Central West and the Blue Mountains and camped at Garie Beach in the Royal National Park or at Palm Beach north of Sydney. From Canberra Ive driven several hundred times over the Great Divide, down a breathtaking escarpment to dozens of forest-enclosed beaches and striking headlands between Jervis Bay and Eden. A speedometer set for those trips would read over 100 000 kilometres, or four times around the globe.

In the process, sea, beach and forested hinterland have become a vital destination for artistic expression, physical challenges, sensual moments and being close to nature. There is much joy in setting up camp, waking to a morning chorus of birds, being refreshed by a pre-breakfast surf, donning a pack and going exploring, fitting a face mask and diving under the glass ceiling, or in a romantic interlude watching the moon climb out of the sea.

first swim

of the summer

slipping inside

the cold green beautiful

body of the sea

(Gerry Jacobson)

I love the interface between land and sea, being mesmerised by a simple straight line horizon, sharing a fire with friends or passers-by or imbibing the natural rhythms of the bush. At the coast I feel active, alert and alive. After five or six days I feel refreshed and ready to go back to the routine of home life. Like many of my friends, and writers like Quentin Chester (The Wild Calling) and Roger Deakin (Wildwood), I thrive on short sojourns away from normal routine.

At primary school in Ihlpohl, a small village near Bremen, I learnt about vast tidal flats that could at low tide be driven across with horse and cart. On the edge of the North Sea there was a line of low windswept islands with names like Wangerooge, Spiekeroog and Olddoog. I made pencil drawings of the islands as well as of the estuary of the Weser in my Erdkunde (geography) exercise book. The Weser flows past Hameln, not far from the tiny village of Rolfshagen where I was born in 1944. Father was posted there in 1941 when his office in Bremen was bombed. He worked for Fockewulf, builders of aeroplanes for the war effort. The company set up an alternative home in a Kurort (health resort) in Rinteln.

We holidayed at Warnemnde near Rostock and built giant circular sand hollows, perhaps five metres across and a metre deep, and decorated the outside walls with outlines of mermaids, fish, birds and sailing boats. We filled some of the shapes with colourful ochres and left others as shell outlines. Every week there was a competition for the best one. We didnt win but enjoyed sunbaking inside the sheltered walls after a very quick dip. At the height of summer, and even with the aid of the warm and far-reaching Gulf Stream, the Baltic was icy, probably colder than the waters off the NSW South Coast in the worst of winters. At only 34 degrees of latitude from the North Pole, it was amazing that we could swim without first breaking through a layer of ice.