The chorus has developed from Kookaburras, Catbirds, Lewin’s Honeyeaters and Noisy Minors
to a Koel, mobs of Lorikeets and Black Cockatoos taunting distance. Throughout the progression, the Pied Butcherbirds sing clearly on form today. Wyn records them on her phone.
I am inside the death pose, it comes to all of us. Eyes closed I can hear the sea, the Lewin’s is back, a Whipbird duet cracks. One call I can’t identify. Song is floating everywhere.
I open my eyes, find the moon split in half about to tangle with the tips of a Bloodwood.
The sun about to join us. The Dollarbirds are finally awake and gargling.
I get up and resume the familiar pose, hunched over the dining table. Writing this up, I’m deaf to the world, until a big green tree frog starts barking, Only the second one we have heard this year. Normal service will be resumed. That’s what we want to hear. Not Wyn reading news aloud that COP 26 is unlikely to succeed. We have our own failed governments State and Federal. Our language is failing us too, and our unequal division of labour, auditory work and visual.
I have just taken a photograph of the light, the sun has thrown up against the west, black spots jive across the paper. Time to retreat into a revised savasana, repeating a mantra
– Silent Spring Silent Spring Silent Spring Silent Spring Silent Spring Silent Spring Silent Spring Silent Spring Silent Spring Silent Spring Silent Spring Silent Spring
Silent Spring
S I l e n t S p r i n g
I have look around our patch of rainforest garden.
But then it’s time to prepare for my farewell party (off to the UK to see my ailing mother for a month).
We start off with a bushwalk before lunch, saw this beauty on the way, then again, returning from the beach found him(her?) in the undergrowth just over a metre from our path.
Food was followed by a quiz, I concocted 12 questions:
1 The dolphin is a common family totem of the Gumbaynggirr. In the language is it
a. yugirr
b. warraaday
c. gayban
3 Urunga Island was proclaimed an Aboriginal Reserve in 1891. When was the village of Urunga proclaimed?
a. 1884
b. 1894
c. 1904.
10 What was the original English name of Hyland Park?
a. Mosquito Park
b. Swampees
c. Skinners swamp
All twelve guests were out after the second question.
Then desert (my trifle was a hit – no jelly, ‘best I have ever tasted’). Then a game of boules, with roaring laughter and chats to Lindy and her National Parks people as they drove over our course. We were back inside for coffee by 4, just as the rainstorm hit, an hour later than predicted.