Currently available at The Book Warehouse, 26 Harbour Dr, Coffs Harbour; Alternatives Bookshop, 105 Hyde St, Bellingen; Matilda St Gallery, Macksville, or via me at frogdownstairs@gmail.com.
This book celebrates the everyday during treatment for cancer – a journal incorporating encounters with wildlife, people and thoughts in Gumbaynggirr saltwater/freshwater Country. 167 pages, 70 colour photographs
A review:
I don’t know what your art does to me but you awake in me my core. And more… I don’t have your ability with words to express myself better.. I wish I could… Am admiring your words and am jealous that you have them…
I am not that much of a daily or natural vessel for poetry and art… But your words, visions, thoughts, awake in me the most spiritual sensations, acute appreciation of life, world and beauty… Thank you…
PS. you teach me something new all the time. Am discovering and listening to Agnes Obel.. What a thrill!
from Day 9 20 Oct
Dooragan National Park (the Birpai name)
is the youngest of three brothers slaughtered
by the witch Widjirriejuggi and interred in this
granite mountain of mica, quartz and feldspar.
As it happens, sailors on the Endeavour also
named the landmarks, Three Brother Mountains.
The rainforest crown is a riddle of green shadows,
home to fundamentals – fungi, lichen, moss,
and fractured rock, the foundation bones.
Life grows from rock, where you place your feet
can be as interesting as polished sacred floors
(even air vents to the crypt are marble).
Rainforests work miraculous succession, seeds
wait on the floor for their opportunity for light.
Life grows on life, grows on life, a Birds Nest Fern
spreads out a luminous umbrella of green.
Bark bleeds lichens, a beautiful palette coalesces
green, yellow, orange, the centre of our spectrum.
We wait for two chattering backpackers to pass,
their accent shouts German. I call them back to point
out the interlaced limb. A Strangler Fig is killing
the tree inside. ‘It will die?’ asks the young man.
‘Yes.’ ‘That’s a shame,’ she says. ‘Not really, figs
are the most important trees in an Australian rainforest.’
