After a month in the UK and nine days of isolation
I am released to Eos, tight-fisted in ochre today. She sets me loose on the edge of the continent, content to watch the river’s muscle rippling patterns of attention, swelling incoming rifts and echoes. From behind the beach, a heavy drone beats glass sonorities.
I taste wingbeats on the ear – Little Black Cormorants arriving from the south, bank and stretch the sky.
I lift my face, sniff the air like a wolf – Acronychia? Can’t see any – one more primitive, limbic mystery. A minimal squeak above brings forth Dollarbird aqua, even in such tight light.
In silhouette, a Sooty Oystercatcher flies upriver and a Striated Heron flies downriver. Burdened by roots, trees barely move. Whereas we travel far too far and far too often.
Pigface flows flowers across a sandstone boulder, am about to pick some bushtucker, a pair of Pied Oystercatchers abandon the submerging sand bar and fly towards me, dropping early onto rocks.
A corner of sight catches clouds of sand. A Stingray is feeding by my feet, using fins to vacuum breakfast, an old Jurassic habit. A Little Tern haunts the background / foreground.
Helios strides through a small door in the extremities, soon reaching a beach hut. Casual site of repose exhaling an archaic sense of ease, content to welcome sun, wind and rain with no need to bother with too many words.
I pick plastic out of the tide line and photograph tyre tracks on the opposite bank where endangered Little Terns once nested. Anger skips through me, that should last until our behaviour changes.
Most of these birds have not been seen here since the Gumbaynggirr hunted here, without us.
