A Stone’s Throw From the Water’s Edge …

Hello dear readers,

Since my last post, we have spent a glorious week in a shack on Mundoo Channel, Hindmarsh Island. I have written of this shack elsewhere, but let me tell you it is the sweetest little place. A stone’s throw from the water’s edge, it has its own small jetty, where our secured fishing vessel rocked gently through the nights, and was taken out by Leigh each day in the hope of catching some Mulloway or Coorong Mullet. However it was a week of dodge tides and no fish were tempted to attach themselves to his line.

Our days were blessed with a smattering of visitors – family and friends who shared our love of the place, as we ate beautiful, simple food, relaxed, and sometimes just sat, mesmerised by the beauty of the waterway and the bird-life that abounds there.

Leigh took our friends out in his boat, to The Murray Mouth – about ten kilometers away by water. The soft, rolling edges that come down to the channel, hold a magic for me. The thing is, I guess, that the land there is largely uninhabited, untrodden and unspoiled by man. There is a scattering of old shacks that whisper of lives lived simply, family holidays where kids were free to explore – coming in at the end of each day with skun knees, sandy, salty legs, pockets full of found objects, raging hunger and tiredness to send them to sleep seconds after their heads hit their pillows.

There is no other place like The Coorong. One of the things I love most about our country is its diversity. Although I have seen much of Australia, it still calls me to its far reaches. So much to look forward to

Yesterday our lovely poets’ group gathered here for a time of reading our work, talking of what inspires us to write the poems we do, and even at one stage, as one among us said, ‘This is like a group therapy session’ (to much laughter).

Each poem read yesterday could have been included in an anthology. A clever, sometimes funny, sometimes deep, mix of fine work. Sometimes the pieces are written in the third person – usually a mere gesture to veil the poet’s ownership in the story. Someone usually asks ‘Is this something from your experience?’ Of course it usually is, the poet owns up and a spirited discussion ensues. I am in awe of the quality of work shared, and feel privileged to be part of such a group.

We talked yesterday of the senses, and how the smell of something, or the sound or sight of something can evoke distant memories. For me, the smell of pine instantly takes me back to a day at my kindergarten, when I, at the age of four, was dancing on damp pine needles as rain drops dripped down from the mother tree. The smell of stocks always takes me back to my mother’s beautiful garden of spring flowers. I loved to water them with a bronze rose attached to the end of the hose. The memory of the utter beauty of those flowers glistening with water, is with me still – seventy odd years later.

Hearing The Animals singing ‘House of the Rising Sun’ takes me back to sitting in my then boyfriend’s car (later my husband of fifty two years) outside of the boarding house I lived in soon after leaving home to work in the city. I was crazy about the song. It is still one of my favourites. All the songs from The Carpenters’ album ‘Close to You,’ take me back to the beginning of our trip around Australia in 1973. We were living in a caravan park in Myrtleford – stopped there for a few weeks while Warren worked to earn enough money for the next leg of our journey. We made some great friends there – one of them lifelong – Leigh. We are together today, after having lost touch for more than forty five years!

I’d bought a cassette tape of the Carpenters album and thrashed it. I still often listen to these hauntingly beautiful songs, and every time I do I am taken back to this wonderful hippie period of my life.

I haven’t shared any of my poems lately, so here is one to add to the mix. I wrote it at the end of our two year trip around Oz.

I’ve known winds in Outback places
Scorching sun that breaks the ground
Tears of parting
New horizons
Railroad yards and five man towns

I’ve known thirst and many hungers
Followed signs that have long blown down
Worn a thousand miles of road dust
Stolen jewels from the desert’s crown

I’ve known rain on lonely mornings
Cotton fields and lack of trees
I’ve known fear and isolation
I’ve known wealth and poverty

I’ve known campsites filled with workers
belly-aching
Acid rain
Searched dense bush for missing children
Sat with the black on their own terrain

I’ve known mornings ripe with fishing
Cooking coals on icy grass
Gorging fish with thawing fingers
Making ends of rations last

I’ve known bruised canoes in rapids
Whirlpools of the mind and day
Trekking home through summer forests
Wordless plans a breath away

I’ve known flood slush in my cornflakes
in my books and in my boots
Shower alcoves black with crickets
Pub fights
Wenches’ wrath let loose

I’ve known hippies on the north’s shores
Kids now buried in the east
Pioneers in Outback west-land
A southern farmer’s restless feet

I’ve known waste of a poet’s thinking
I’ve known times when the machine has slowed
to little more than a dying idle
before the balm of the open road

I may have put this one up in one of my earliest blogs, but it seems fitting here.

Till next time, take care, be happy.

Sue

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