Black Duck, page 7
I saw a Mudlark attending to the tail of a Buru (kangaroo) the other day but the roo seemed to resent it. Is the beak of the Mudlark too sharp? The personalities and habits of all the animals are incredibly compelling and make the land vibrant with story.
Googar
There’s an old dead tree in the middle of the yard and most people reckon it should come down, but a hundred birds a day roost on its branches at various times to take advantage of the 360-degree view of the country. A few years ago a Masked Owl was living in one of the several holes and frightened the life out of my neighbour from across the river, Tony Brindley.
After George Johnson died, Tony looked after his little dog, Mate. Tony came over to clean up some weeds on George’s place and the owl screamed at him. The scream of a Masked Owl has made tougher men than Tony start dripping.
Anyway, no, I won’t be cutting down the tree. Sunday 13 February, Lyn and I saw a little Googar (goanna) sidle down the trunk and make its way across the paddock toward the house. But no self-respecting Birran Durran Durran was going to stand for that, so they shrieked at, bombed and stalked the creature until it disappeared.
I knew it would be somewhere close and suspected he was hunting duck eggs but old Wangarabell found him in the compost bin. He’d been sliding around in the moisture and shone like a jewelled prince. The black and yellow stripes and stars are fitting for the royalty they believe they hold.
We sent him on his way from the bin where he’d been hunting rats. I was happy about that but Wangarabell wasn’t so, goodbye Googar.
We picked more plums and stewed them. I love stewed fruit on cereal in the morning and it doesn’t hurt in a curry either.
I needed to take Lyn back to Gipsy to put her chooks to bed and on the way back we met Dale and Carla (yeah, I taught them both) who had been picking apples on their property just upstream from Yumburra. They passed across a bag as our boats idled in the stream. Beautiful day.
I was busy the next day with management issues and some writing jobs. I finished a foreword for David and Rebecca’s new Warndu book titled First Nations Food Companion Cookbook, and added another verse to the ‘Three Rivers’ song I began with Uncle Max, and it was a relief to swim in the warm water of the river. Later I caught two lovely bream while juggling phone calls about the sad business of having to stick up for our culture against people who pretend to love us.
I went to Pambula to talk to Todd and Ruth of Wild Rye’s Bakery about grain and flour products and the upcoming EAT Festival. They are really lovely people and have helped us a lot without having asked for a thing in return. They allow us to use a container behind the bakery where our fellas are threshing and drying grain. The aroma is truly sensational.
Australia will come to love Australian grain. But how will they ensure that Aboriginal people are part of the industry? That question again, but sometimes you need to repeat something a hundred times before a bell rings in the colony.
Mick was still plugging away on the roads and I went and picked up four large pipes to act as culverts to take water away from the road. When the pipes were set into the road below the dam, we got ready to drive to Apollo Bay to see Jack and Shelly and granddaughter Lily, and of course, Clark, the world’s gentlest dog.
It’s ten hours to the Bay so we camped at the infamous Kansas City Motel in Bairnsdale and had a really lovely meal at the Terminus Hotel. Bell sleeps in the car, tolerates the motel and never complains about the length of the journey. She is a joy.
Lyn and I drove on to Apollo Bay, but a stone thrown by a mower smashed Lyn’s passenger side window. That slowed us down but we had a great night with Jack and Shell and Lily, who has her own very definite personality. She is a watchful kid, so, if you say something she looks at you to work out who you are.
Took the peaceful Clark for a walk on Jack’s track. I heard a little bird I’d heard before at Cape Otway. It is a very loud and insistent call, birrita birrita driit driit. I searched for it but couldn’t find it. I’m sure it’s a scrubwren or thornbill but nothing on the bird app matches it. Really intriguing. Clark was no help. (I tracked the bird down at Gipsy Point in autumn 2023 and, with the help of Lyn and the bird app, identified it as the beautiful Rose Robin.)
Got back to the farm on Saturday 19 and met up with the Kempsey mob and Aunty Dolly. We had a long yarn. Aunt is a real comic. But a thoughtful one. Her humour belies the seriousness of her commitment to Aboriginal culture.
The Kempsey mob are interested in the foods we are growing and so we sat around the campfire to talk about growing our foods and ensuring Aboriginal employment in the industry.
Gurandgi Robert, Amiey and family arrived just to have a yarn. It was lovely of them to drive all the way. Robert works hard for Gurandgi lore and comes to every event. It was reassuring to host them on the farm as all the disturbance and pain washing around is unsettling. Sitting down and talking culture without having to explain the entire history of Australia is a relief.
I was on the tractor trying to finish off the road surfacing but the Kinchela Boys Home people came to have a yarn and then the Maritime Union people Joe, Evan and Shalah. All lovely people, but the day disappears pretty quickly.
I sought the refuge of the river and caught a lovely bream to give to Pat Wilkinson, Lyn’s Gipsy neighbour and great friend. Pat is a highly intelligent ex-doctor and a great friend to Aboriginal people. She worked for a long time with Uncle Jim, a staunch advocate for his people. Jim and Pat worked closely in Aboriginal health for decades. Unfortunately, Pat died early in January 2023 aged ninety-four.
Lyn and I took the boat out on the lake just to get away from the phone and drifted about just having a drink and talking about kids and jobs and fish. Lyn described it as a small oasis of peace, every bird softly winding up the day’s activity, the world becoming quieter and quieter, stiller and stiller as the sky finds its last colour.
When we separated all those years ago we had stopped finding that time to talk at dusk. The river is so calm and stolid that it forbids hectic conversation. Talk flows at the speed of an idling bream dreaming by the rocks.
Next morning there was mist hanging low over the river, unusual for this time of year, but it made for a quiet and masked journey. The farm, however, was in full swing with Nathan doing great work in the gardens.
That night I watched the ABC episodes of People’s Republic of Mallacoota and was shocked that it was so negative. The whole six weeks was a nightmare but to listen to grievances against the authorities sounded cheap and churlish. The plan, instituted by one of our coppers and the local head of Parks, was formulated a decade earlier but its structure meant that the town’s readiness was probably responsible for the fact that no lives were lost in the town apart from Freddy Becker who died of a heart attack while fighting the fire at Maramingo.
Nathan weeding the Murnong garden bed
Individuals and ad hoc teams were also wonderful, so to hear people carping and finger-pointing was upsetting. We’ve got all these rights these days but little responsibility. I can’t think of a time where debate has been less gracious and respectful.
Meanwhile, work continued unabated with manager issues pressing and getting ready for the ABC to arrive for filming. The show is called Movin’ to the Country, but I still haven’t seen it. Grace is also filming and Malyan Winsor arrived and I showed him around the farm and introduced him to the crew. His mum, Sharon, is the dynamo behind Indigiearth food company. I felt mean that I had so little time to spend with the young man.
I had a late Zoom talking to earnest young food sustainability people and I was flagging in front of the screen. Since Covid I have been averaging one of these online sessions a day and they take so much energy, but while I was talking, I saw six to eight White Kites circling above the Water Ribbon and Cumbungi dams.
The Black-shouldered Kites and Nankeen Kestrels are never seen in numbers greater than two and here was a flock. It made me wonder if they were Letter-winged Kites. I haven’t seen any in the district since the seventies. I was trapped by the screen and couldn’t leave to investigate. When I finished the Zoom they were gone, but their beauty and wildness had lifted my spirit.
I filmed with Grace the next day then jumped on the tractor to smooth some sections of the road because rain was on the way. Some more food nerds rocked up and I had a cup of tea with them and tried not to look at the tractor parked on the hill. For a man trying to be a hermit I’m failing badly. I like people but not so many at once.
Noel and Trish arrived later so we could organise Black Duck Foods after the departure of the manager. We had a great meeting but much better yarns. Noel is a vivid raconteur and it distracted me from the problems of the farm … and my inability to achieve hermithood.
The rain came and I had to clear drains and shore up culverts and pipes. I’ve been doing it all my life and controlling water flow is restful work, like playing as a child, except the pick and shovel are heavy and the back is no longer supple.
On Sunday 27 we spent all day on the lake with Noel and Trish. We had breakfast at Amy’s tiny cafe in Mallacoota after a glorious boat trip. Amy is the daughter of my cricket captain, Presto, but she has survived that impediment quite well. Presto is an Energizer Bunny and works and plays nonstop. Amy has inherited that work ethic; and the smile.
We picked up mussels in the lake, both Bimbla (Blood Mussel) and Dalgal (Black Mussel) but had no luck with the fish. I was hoping to get the boat ready for Noel and Trish to take out overnight where their fantasy of cooking fresh prawns, fish and mussels on a beach somewhere on the lakes had them sighing in their beer. I’m sure their recovery from the fire that took their house is not complete. May never be.
Last day of February was taken up by SBS filming and a Zoom with Melbourne University’s Dookie campus. That night Noel, Cooma, Nathan and I went up to Merimbula for the premiere of Cooma’s film on the damage being done by brumbies in the Alpine National Park. Richard ‘Cooma’ Swain has been fighting valiantly to save the mountain wetlands.
Uncle Ozzie Cruse was there too and grabbed my arm as we were leaving and had an urgent conversation about the community. He’s really worried, the old man, worried not just about the state of things but the slippage of sand through the narrow funnel of his time.
I owe a lot to Uncle Oz because he was one of the many elders who stuck up for me when the right-wing press were trying to destroy me. One day he stopped me in the street at Eden and shook his finger at me, ‘Don’t you ever, ever, stop what you are doing.’ It was so comforting to have his support.
Rain and Rivers
It was 1 March and the currawongs, wattlebirds, bowerbirds, magpies and galahs were all raucous in the uncovered apple tree near the woodshed. The apples must be just ripe enough for them to puncture the skin.
Satin Bowerbird and our dog’s bowl
I am covering for the Black Duck general manager for the next few weeks and this, combined with farm work, is a challenge. The rain is also complicating things. Nathan and his brother Mook had to go home early as the news came through that the Towamba River was rising. They’ve been getting more rain than us. Turns out they were too late and had to go on to Eden.
The Towamba is a great river. I used to catch beautiful bass under the bridge before clear felling forestry caused tons of sand to choke up the bass holes. I once saw a mulloway chase a school of fish into the shallows near the mouth. When the fish realised they were trapped there was an eruption of fish flipping and spinning in the air. It was a remarkable sight.
More rain was coming our way, so I was on the tractor trying to shore up the new road work so that we didn’t lose all the expensive gravel.
It was still warm so I had a swim in the river and a little way downstream four swans were sailing with typically serene elegance. I must have unsettled the two adults because they took to the air.
I was speculating whether the two smaller ones were this year’s hatchlings in their adult plumage, when a Mirridar (Sea Eagle) flew out of a tree and attacked one of adults.
The eagle wheeled about and was homing in on the swan that had been knocked out of the air when the eagle saw me and banked away. The habit of swans and many other birds to distract predators from their flightless young has its own hazards; sniping eagles being one of them.
I once saw a young fledgling attacked while in a family group. It disappeared under the water and I thought it must have been killed, but thirty seconds later it bobbed up and swam into a patch of protective Phragmite Reeds. How did it keep under for so long? What lessons are young birds taught when no one is watching?
Early one morning down near the Bandstand on the Jinoor I was fishing in pearly dawn light. I had two lovely fish in the keeper bag so I wasn’t trying too hard, just enjoying the rising sun. The Bandstand is a funny name for a sand bar but one old local has another map which suggests it used to be labelled Sandbank. Cartographer’s clerical error?
Anyway, just as I was thinking of pulling in my lines, I saw a young Mirridar gliding along the bank with its talons stretched out in the striking pose.
It plunged its feet into the water and latched on to a huge mullet but when it tried to take off the fish was too heavy for the young bird to lift. It was a case of the monkey reaching into the jar to grab the banana, not being able to withdraw its hand but unwilling to let go of the prize.
The young Mirridar was in that predicament and as it mulled the conundrum its feathers began to get heavy with water. What to do? Well, it rested for a moment and then swept its wings forward in a rowing motion and rowed the fish to shore and dragged it up onto the beach. I don’t expect to see that even repeated but very glad I was up early to see it.
I’d been picking nectarines and tomatoes as quick as I could and converting them into sauces and pickles. I got the crop in and did a bit of weeding and when I looked up to straighten my back I saw a whole mob of swifts plummeting like warheads across the paddocks. Storm coming. I battened down the hatches and was bringing in garden tools ahead of the rain when the swifts hurtled across the paddock at knee height and I couldn’t move.
There were a hundred or more and it felt like an attack but, for the swifts, I was just one more obstruction. Years earlier I was leading a tour of the Cape Otway Lighthouse and when I swung open the heavy door onto the balcony, swifts were bulleting toward us and veering away at the last minute.
I had Irish and Asian tourists and they were mesmerised. Lyn did a tour later and the same thing was happening. I think they were using the white bulk of the tower to highlight insects or maybe using the obstacle as an entrapment for their prey. Anyway, the tourists got their money’s worth.
I used to like the overseas tourists because most understood what a war looked like and many knew what a genocide looked like so they understood my story of Australia’s history straight away.
Young German tourists were very interesting. They were hyperconscious of their country’s human rights record but determined never again to be part of anything like the Holocaust. They understood the Invasion of Australia in a visceral way.
Many Australian men, on the other hand, wanted to argue whether any Aboriginal people were killed and when confronted by incidents and numbers would often conclude, ‘Well, they weren’t using the place anyway.’ My feeling is that Australia is about to leave that opinion behind, but perhaps I show too much faith.
Aboriginal people manipulated trees to produce significant shapes. Some were for intricate cultural purposes and others were simple directions.
Autumn
Heron
Every autumn I wait for the rains to begin, reviving paddocks,
filling dams and creeks, soaking the gardens. There are always
floods, or too much water in an inconvenient place, our
responsibility is to watch the land, learn the drainage pattern
and adapt to it. Any problems after that belong to you.
Nothing Like a Good Flood
The rain was getting heavier and I was nervous about the roads. There’s a sense of helplessness once you’ve opened all the drains and culverts as best you can. You can only listen to rain hammering on the roof, watch the swamp expand and river rise, and hope.
Lyn went to a Glossy Black-Cockatoo ID workshop that looked at a block of land at Gipsy Point where the frequent cool burning by the owner had allowed many Casuarina plants to survive the fires and leave a haven for these magnificent old friends.
Graham Berry owns that land and has always taken an interest in Aboriginal history, and for a decade has been trialling cool burn techniques. He’s a cantankerous old curmudgeon but he arrived like that in 1975 when we recruited him straight from Teachers’ College. He loved the place and never left.
He was a science teacher and taught kids about gravity by throwing eggs off the school roof. Now he is trying to protect the habitat of a seriously endangered bird.
There are still numbers of these rare and beautiful birds but how they escaped the fires is a mystery. Lyrebirds and reptiles will shelter in wombat burrows but how other birds and mammals survive is not well known. After fires I saw lyrebirds and kangaroos immediately after the fire had passed. Where had they been? I see very little evidence of dead animals after fires but we know the losses must have been huge. Anyway, the survivors were greeted with enormous joy and relief.
The rain kept falling and the river had a roiling motion, dangerous. I shifted Nadgee further up into Yumburra Creek and put her on a long line fore and aft, because in the last flood she ended up on top of the jetty and when the flood receded I could barely move her.
