Bombie and the Beast

I once experienced a violent earthquake, and my first, immediate feeling was that I no longer stood on the solid and familiar earth, but on the skin of a gigantic animal that was heaving under my feet ... It was this image that impressed itself on me, not the physical fact ... these effects anthropomorphise the passion of nature, and the purely physical element becomes an angry god.   
Carl Jung, 1978.
(thanks MF)

The Stirrup Iron

One day I took the dogs Gypsy and Jack and walked along the cliffs to Sandpatch. I drove the ute for the first part, along the limestone tracks behind the prison, the race course and then to where I once thought I'd seen a thylacene.

What I'd seen was probably a monster feral cat but its stripes were distinct and the animal was bigger than any cat. It loped across the track two hundred metres ahead of me and its tail was  kangaroo straight and hanging down. Maybe it was a fox that I saw. Maybe I imagined it. I was only eleven.

This day, the dogs went ahead, past the Water Corp compounds fenced off with hurricane mesh, along skinny tracks flanked with peppermint trees. Towards where the white witches lazily turn on big whispering arcs, I came to  the place where I'd lost the stirrup iron.

I was eleven or twelve when I took tourists out for horse riding tours over the coast hills to Sandpatch. They paid extra to get to the coast but for a half rate I'd weave a ride through sweet-smelling stands of boronia and paperbarks, then over to where the limestone springs fed the orchids and purple flag. Boomers and their families, sleeping in the groves, would wake as we trod past them, springing out of the bushes and bounding away. Sometimes then, the horses would spook and gallop off home without their riders. Public litigation wasn't so much of a problem as it is now.

The day I lost the stirrup, I led a group through a lowland red gum forest and then headed up to the coast hills. Now, I can't remember the moment when one of the horses finally threw it in, said "I quit" and buck jumped the hapless tourist off his saddle and into the black sand, but I remember the aftermath. We were near the cliffs where the Southern Ocean roars in to hit the limestone. The tourist had to sit behind my saddle on the way home and I led the recalcitrant horse by her reins (once I'd caught her). We returned to the riding stables with everything and everyone except a single stirrup.

Des and Jock checked the busted stirrup leather and conferred. They got on their horses and took me back out to find the stirrup. It was one of the last times I saw Jock riding a horse. He took his Palomino stallion that day. They wanted me to show them the country between the tourist getting chucked off and when I caught the horse. Thinking back, they probably were enjoying an excuse for a ride but the afternoon was also spiced with a peculiar competitive nastiness between the two men. (There was a woman in there.)

When we arrived at the cliffs, they both started questioning me about the exact spot when the horse had dumped her rider. I couldn't remember. Jock and Des rode around, looking for the stirrup. They were annoyed with me and their language was ... well it wasn't threatening but yes, it sort of was. I was flustered with their pressure and wondering why the stirrup was so important. I was late back from that ride anyway. I was afraid of Des. I'd always been afraid of Des, and him wheeling and turning his quarter horse through the scrub and coming back to glare at me with his loose blue eyes and grilling me again over a stirrup just did my head in.

I can say that now, "did my head in," It's a groan up term but I was so young then that the phrase didn't mean what it does now.
We never did find that stirrup iron.
I took the dogs out there recently and stood in the spot where the tourist was thrown. I wished I could find the stirrup under a shrub, or see the loose sand of the track fall away and reveal the edge of its iron tread.

Fishing Shack

Going Feral

Daisy

You can read a bit about Daisy Bates over at Bob's blog, Kiangardarup (here). The self styled 1890s anthropologist married the horse thief Harry 'Breaker' Morant as a dewy-faced immigrant and then married again, bigamously, while Morant was executed in Pretoria for shooting unarmed prisoners. Daisy took off for the desert and lived with the Aborigines, where over the following 40 years she recorded genealogies and wrote several books. The main criticism that I've read of Daisy Bates is that she used her theory of 'smoothing the pillow of a dying race' to further her career (and funding) as the primary documentor of the Aboriginal peoples.

In the papers I've been reading today, Bates writes about social organisation in north western and south coast Australian Aborigines. She goes into matrimonial traditions, circumcision and subincision, birthing rituals, complex kinship systems and who could marry whom according to their moities. Then she starts on sex. Despite being a serial bigamist, she was no Lady Chatterly (or a D.H. Lawrence more to the point ...) She was able to describe in graphic detail the subincision procedure, infanticide and childbirth but when it came to sex, Daisy Bates resorted to Latin:

Hic mihi enarravit quomode se ponant mulier videtur corpus it ponit ut vir, genibus suppositis, manibus lumbum prehendere posit, unde fit ut genitalia quam proxime conjungur: so modo fieri potest ut semen in vaginum introire poss it.

Section III,  Social Organisation, Part 4 (1), Paper on Marriage Laws and Customs, read before the Glasgow Medical Conference, Folio 13/64-79

West to East

To speak the name of the dead is to make them live again.
Akhenaten,
Dorothy Porter.

 I killed an owl that night. It rose up from the roadkill it was picking at and hit my windscreen with a wet sound. I thought the glass was broken but it was only a mark like a sweaty hand, an owl essence spread across the screen.

We drove for miles and miles through yellowed fields, the yield lopped off to leave acres of buzz cut. The moon rose and the constant crosswind that had been with us all day dropped away and everything became calm. I stopped at a closed petrol station and the owner came out and granted me and the jerrycan enough fuel to carry on when I told him where we were headed. I drove a thousand kilometres that night. The children slept in the bed of the Bedford and I drove the back roads through rice fields lined with river gums, through a few states. Jack rabbits launched themselves bravely into the headlights. I filled the car with the jerry by a darkened weatherboard house on the side of the road, hoping the kids wouldn't wake up in the still.

Byron Bay: We woke in the morning by the town beach barbeques. Everyone else but us had been kicked out by the ranger. Maybe he'd taken pity on our WA number plate and the ancient van while he walked around thumping his fist on the roofs of all the other illegal campers. After that long day and night of driving, Byron embraced us with dripping trees, humid, silky air, adventitious roots, water dragons on the beach and athletic, tanned people doing yoga in the sunrise.

By eight am the beach was busy. A school of life savers in Speedos ran by as the three of us dipped our toes in the eastern seaboard for the first time. They stopped and insisted on having their photograph taken with us. (It's one of my more strange holiday pics.) The sand was light, golden crickets chanted and the waves were gentle and perfectly formed. It was a lovers' town, a Babylon, a parody of itself.  The car park filled with people and by eleven, the luscious morning had broadened into a glare and the bearded dragons fled in disgust. A perfect bikinied Diaz walked up the beach carrying a surfboard on her scalp. The graffiti on the point she paddled out to said 'locals only'.

The locals all go to Brunswick Heads to swim. The streets in Byron teemed with trudging folk, blank faced but looking around. Shop keepers were jaded, tired of smiling, of dealing with the mess of humanity. People didn't seem to know or care about each other. It's just after New Years Eve, I kept reminding myself. The mangroves and lush rainforests and turquoise waters and lithe pythons ... this old hippy/mill/whaling town groaned under the weight of sea changer expectations: crowds and money and real estate. Anyone could buy surfboards, sunglasses, board shorts or towels but try finding a litre of milk or a loaf of bread or a moment of peace in the main street.

On the way to the police station we were caught in a gridlock of January holiday traffic. At the counter, on saying why we'd driven across the continent, I was met with a blank look. The policeman who was there the day he died had been recently transferred to Sydney. And anyway, the harried officer told me, you'd be best off heading for Mullumbimby. There was no police station in Mulli but somebody there might remember what happened.

Anthrop 101: Westralian Culture

Pete F has taken some beautiful photos of the west coast but I reckon this one surpasses anything I've seen because it addresses themes of culture, structure and agency.

http://theworstofperth.com/