Writing from the Bibbulmun Track

Despair and hope both

The forest is oddly quiet at first, all the way from Kalamunda in the Perth hills where the track starts, to Collie, over three hundred kilometres south. You wonder if winter is to blame—birds are quieter in the winter, aren’t they?—but the blackened trunks and epicormic growth of eucalypts in distress and the thriving weeds in the understory tell that other story, the one all Australia tells now, of fires both wild and planned, of millions of animals perishing. There’s a telephone number to call if you find an injured animal, although there are no injured animals; there are hardly any animals at all.

You have been told that volunteers help maintain the Bibbulmun track, including the forty-nine campsites with their three-sided sleeping shelters. One evening, early on in the hike, the weather turning foul, you opt for the shelter instead of your tent. You are treated to a run of storms, with lightning followed immediately by thunder, and rain then hail that crashes onto the roof and sounds like many billiard balls dropped onto tile. Shelter is a good word for what you experience, and you think of those volunteers and the work they do. Not long after, you meet a volunteer, at a riverside campsite, doing a routine maintenance check. The day before, he tells you, he fixed a table with a lean at another campsite. You know that table, you exclaim; your stove wouldn’t work properly due to the lean. Next time it will, he says, and you both laugh. You are re-reading The Lord of the Rings on this hike and you want to tell him that the volunteers would be the hobbits and heroes of this story but you fear something might be lost in translation so you don’t say anything.

The trees

The trees, all the way from Balingup to Denmark, over five hundred kilometres, ask you over and over to crane your neck and try to take them in. They are the biggest trees you have ever seen other than the Californian redwoods. They are like old friends and yet not friends at all, for you can probably only make friends with trees of one forest in a lifetime and yours is near Binna Burra in Lamington National Park, among Antarctic beeches, not here. Still, you crane your neck and learn their names, karri and tingle. There are birds now, and animals you’ve never seen before, and you do your best to learn their names too. You learn that tingle trees are Gondwana trees, just like Antarctic beeches. Once you know even a little, you feel more at home.

The sea

The sea appears one day and ignores you, despite your awe. You walk along cliffs and down steps to beaches to dive into blue-green water when the sun shines. You take a canoe across one inlet, as if you know how to do that, and walk across another with your pants rolled up as high as they’ll go and your boots around your neck.

Coffee etc.

The Wagon in Collie, the Shed in Balingup, the brand new Just Lofti in Pemberton, Ravens in Denmark and Naked Bean in Albany, make lifechanging coffee, and Garden Eats in Dwellingup adds cake with bitter cherry and sweet cardamom you wish you’d bought a second and third piece of for later. The Karri Country Good Food store in Northcliffe and A2 in Balingup welcome you to buy only the small amounts of things a hiker needs, teeny bags of nuts and dried fruit and olive oil and soap and chocolate. Crossings bakery in Pemberton offers the apple pie you’d do the hike again for, and the Green Pantry in Denmark stocks a lembas-like fruit and nut bread from Bred in Albany that sustains you for the final days.

The toasted sandwich from the Cape Café at Cosy Corner may be the best meal you’ll ever eat.

Boots or shoes, wet or dry

It’s the angst-ridden, ire-raising debate among hikers, many of whom these days swear by shoes and celebrate wet feet by wading the puddled track and through the rain. Not you. You wear rain pants over the heavy boots you swap out for Crocs in those long, deep puddles so the boots stay dry, you tell others, smugly. On the second-to-last day a squall turns into a dump of rain that pours water down your boots before you can get your rain pants on and you learn that even wet boots are all right.

Walkers are happy

With wet or dry feet, walkers may be happier than people who don’t walk, the Reids, Amanda and Julian, Tristy and Angela, and Lance and Jo, trail companions you could never have planned for who make the trail so much better. And Jim, your allocated Bibbulmun volunteer and a walker, who makes funny jokes about rats and bats. It is a thesis worth testing, the walker happiness thesis, because if it proves correct we should all just walk.

The whole may be more than the sum of the parts

You told yourself, before you left home, that a hike of a thousand kilometres is just like four hikes of two hundred and fifty kilometres and you have done one of those. It proves true, although you also start to see that the whole may be more than the sum of the parts. In the final days, you wonder what you’ve learned. You think you haven’t really learned anything. The Zen proverb quoted by a friend helps. ‘Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.’

When you finish, part of you wants to turn around and walk back, and not just for the apple pie. There was also the toasted sandwich.

Thirteen reasons why you should do the Carnarvon Great Walk and also hope

1. The dead animals on the road on the way in (which might not, at first glance, fit under hope as a title; bear with me). You tell yourself the kangaroos and possums are not as sad as the wombat and echidna. You are prioritising by species. There’s a fox, hard to prioritise, and a cow, same, and dark blood on the tarmac in places. You can’t afford to be self-righteous, however much you might like to. You killed a wallaby last year, driving to a national park at night because it suited your schedule.

2. Ranger Sheridan Lawton and Uncle Fred Conway, who show you how to be a better human by being better humans, offering, on the morning you are setting out, a smoking ceremony to mark the start of NAIDOC week for which the theme is heal country, heal our nation. The ceremony can cleanse away bad spirits, Uncle Fred says. Someone asks why the Bidjara and Karingbal peoples who own the land are not prominently named near the park entry as they might be in southern states. Uncle Fred grew up at Woorabinda Aboriginal Reserve, he says softly. ‘If I put my arm around a woman,’ he says, coming over and putting his arm around you, ‘I’d be locked up for two years.’ He wasn’t allowed to speak his own language. ‘I would like very much to have my language, but I don’t,’ he says. As for ownership of the gorge, Uncle Fred says, a special place, ‘I hope one day…’ You wonder how he can hope at all, given what he’s put up with. The sandalwood smoke is sweet.

3. The walk that first day through the gorge, which takes you into itself, stencil art handprints that are older than the Pyramids and ten times older than Jesus.

4. Two children you meet at the first campsite at Big Bend, twelve-year-old Jarrah humming the riff of a Star Wars theme, later blending it into the ancient cycad forest seamlessly, and nine-year-old Merrin, full of wry humour, who get up every morning to walk with their parents Jodi and Josh with not one complaint, not in your hearing anyway, a total eighty-five up-and-down kilometres over six days.

5. The trail for humans—not the one for feral pigs and kangaroos—through long grass and burned forest, marked by occasional orange arrows, of which there are just enough to help you decide you are so skilled with map and compass you could lead Bear Grylls out of trouble. You are grateful for head ranger Lindie Pasma who decided where to put the orange arrows and was teary at the smoking ceremony.

6. The forest on the Consuelo tableland, those giant mahogany trees—Eucalyptus laevopenia— coming to you as the old friends trees sometimes are. You sit with them a while and make tea.

7. The walking, one foot after the other, the walking, which makes sense when nothing else does, the walking, for which you may not require hope but which may slowly build hope back.

8. The sleeps, from first dark to first light in the freezing cold, and the shooting star at the moment you put your head out of the tent one midnight.

9. The last campsite, on top of the entire world, a sunset one day and sunrise the next, as if life could always be lived.

10. A wedge-tailed eagle, a king parrot, a pale-faced rosella, a currawong and kookaburras, a greater glider you hear chattering but do not see, and the calls of owls, a powerful, a barking and a boobook, for whom a mouse plague is not all bad.

11. Another boobook, this one’s eyes pecked out by noisy miner birds (perhaps the second worst species) that Uncle Fred picks up and puts under a tree near the visitor centre. ‘If he’s still there tomorrow, I’ll take him home,’ Uncle Fred says.  

12. The platypus you see before dawn on the last day, which duck-dives, surely a post-hope move, that duck dive, the sort of move Buddha might have made, after the bodhi tree, enlightened.

13. Gurrumul’s Djarimirri Child of the Rainbow playing on the car stereo on the road out, the first rays of sun on the gorge, the cows chewing and the kangaroos bounding over yellow grass, an eagle guarding something dead on the side of the road, and you driving slowly enough to keep it all alive for as long as you can.

Lessons from Cooloola and Braiding Sweetgrass

Shadow and footprints on cooloola sandpatch

“I wanted to know why we love the world, why the most ordinary scrap of meadow can rock us back on our heels in awe.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer

You know you will have to cross the Cooloola sandpatch on the second morning, but overnight winds have blown away yesterday’s human footprints which might have marked the path for you and so you will have to rely on a compass.

You don’t like following a compass because you are easily lost. It’s such a relief when you see a walker coming in the other direction because if you head for the walker at all times, you believe, you will find the trailhead on the other side.

You are in the middle of the sandpatch when the walker disappears entirely.

Sandpatch is an odd word. It may be two words, words that swallow walkers.

Litoria campsite has large eucalyptus trees you can look up at while lying on one of the wooden platforms in the communal area stretching muscles that don’t want to stretch. You could be convinced that these trees are sentient. You think this campsite is named for littoral rainforest, although the second t is missing, you realise (and it’s not a rainforest) but it is named for a frog. Literally.

You meet four young people doing their Duke of Edinburgh qualifying camp and the two teachers from Coomera Anglican College who would be on holiday if they weren’t doing this for the students. You know young people are balm to old and weary souls; they shout and laugh and play mathematical games with dice and tell you of the hope you once had for the future. Here among the eucalyptus trees of a literal forest, their hope seems more than possible, and their teachers more than ordinarily good humans.

Still, you know there is not always justice. The world doesn’t work like that.

The first day, you walked behind the dunes and up the hill to Brahminy campsite overlooking the ocean. It was very hot, although it is winter. The trees that would have provided shade burned in the wildfire started in the spring of 2019 by a beach camper who threw coals that were not quite extinguished from a brazier onto the dunes. The grass caught alight. The fire spread to the forest which burned for three months.

Some trees are sprouting leaves straight from their trunks now, epicormic growth that will help them survive. Many have no leaves and are dead.

At night at Dutgee campsite by the Noosa river, there are blue lights over the ground in the beam of your head torch. You think they might be fireflies until you look closer and see that they are tiny spiders and the blue lights are the lights of eyeshine, tapedum lucidum, a layer of tissue in the eyes of many vertebrates that reflects visible light and improves night vision. In the morning, when you set out before dawn, there are thousands of these blue lights on the trail.

You see the purple and gold flowers growing next to one another. You are in Australia, twelve thousand miles from Robin Wall Kimmerer in the United States whose luminous book Braiding Sweetgrass, a scientist poet’s meditation on indigenous and scientific knowledge, speaks to this very matter.

As a botany student, Kimmerer noticed Canada aster with its purple flowers would always grow near goldenrod with its bright yellow flowers, creating a colour combination of great beauty. She wanted to study why but her academic adviser told her if she had wanted to study beauty she should be in art school not science. Years later, as a professor bringing together her science and the indigenous knowledge of her ancestors, Kimmerer returned to the question, discovering that purple and gold colours are pleasing not only to human eyes, but to the eyes of bees, which is why these purple and gold flowers grow next to one another.

Here, on the trail to Cooloola in the other hemisphere, the same colours are doing the same good work.

The giant Kauri pines at the rainforest end of the walk have naked trunks. You must not stand under Kauri pines between December and March as their fruit might fall on your head and cause death but now it is June. You stand under the tree bravely and record the moment using your telephone camera perched on your hiking pack to take the picture.

You swim naked in a perched lake which is a lake on sand that uses the rotted vegetation to create its basin. The water is sweet and cold. Not a human soul, not one, molests you.

It is day five. The sound of a whip bird is as clear in your ears as it will ever be.

You hear the owl. You might be starting to understand. Probably not.

Brave writer under kauri pine.