Headland

Country of the Gumbaynggirr and Yaegl peoples.

Yesterday was almost a didn’t day. I woke early but I felt tired. I sat around reading, and planned to write, but I just wasn’t feeling sufficiently inspired.

Finally, I looked at the high thin cloud clearing outside and I came here instead.

A beach empty of people is always full of so much else. The complete absence of footprints makes you appreciate every grain of sand. Each one was once a portion of something else - stone, the Earth’s own architecture - and now it is the archi-texture of my delight. I take off my shoes just to feel it against the soles of my feet - gritty and granular, firm where it is wet - here where the waves wash - but also yielding gently to each step, making all movement sensuous.

Then there is the deliciousness of watching the water approach - rolling towards the shore in jade green waves which look as though they might swallow you, but which break at last, shedding a thinning film of foam up the slight slope of the beach to swirl over your feet in a cool splash with their final fragile gasp.

Each wave is a memory of the one before - a kinetic deja-vous of every wave that has ever shaped this shore.

Surfers will tell you that waves come in sets. It might be as few as three or as many as ten, and when I was a surfer myself (briefly) we said that the 7th wave would always be the biggest. That was the lore. It depends on the beach of course and the weather, and the tides - and whatever storms have patted the sea off beyond the horizon - but it depends on the surfer too and when you start to count. There were more stories about this than I could remember, but the thing I soon realised is - we only count waves at all - days also, years too - because our time here is so short.

The beach beguiles us because it is neither ocean nor land but the ever changing interface of the two.

This is why Poets love them. Beaches were made for metaphor.

Beyond the beach is a complex headland - a carved and scalloped stretch of cliffs and coves which I wander around whenever I need to think - or to cease thinking. There is always something new to explore, both externally and internally - as if the word “head-land” has two meanings whenever I am here.

This time it is the interaction of the shifting sea and the sun, lighting a window in a little sea cave only visible if you leave the hills above and enter the splash zone below.

In fact I have been walking - clambering and climbing - around the cliffs all the way from the beach. Now with my boots firmly back on because the rock here is a crazily complex combination of metamorphosed sandstones - folded and tilted by tectonic forces - interleaved with igneous intrusions; some kind of volcanic rock which erodes into fiercely sharp edges. Order and chaos together - much as my thoughts are today. Logic does not by itself make sense to me - we need the sharp edges of emotion and creativity, weathered by life.

Out here, where the coast bends round towards the North, the wind is stronger and the swell larger. The water heaves up and down over ragged eroded reefs which in calmer times are a perfect place to swim - home to fish, and rocky crevices with sea urchins and anemones. There are even outcrops of hard stony coral here if you know where to look - near the Southern limit of coral growth but growing as the sea warms and the coral limit trends further South - another thought to consider.

Salt tolerant grasses have colonised the edge of the hill and because it is the final day of the first month of Spring, here in Australia, the Flannel Flowers are out. Actinotus helianthi - looking a lot like a daisy but in fact (and strangely) it is in the botanical family of Apiaceae - the same family as parsley and the humble carrot. The common name - Flannel Flower - comes from the soft, downy, padded texture of the flowers, which do indeed feel much like the finest flannel to the touch. I suspect it is really a xerophytic adaptation - greatly reducing water loss and enabling the plant to maintain its flowers through a hot dry and windy Antipodean Spring season.

The First Nation Aboriginal peoples used them for medicine - the plant has anti-inflammatory properties as an infusion - and seeing it reminds me of the Gumbaynggirr and Yaegl people who lived here for time out of mind - and still do.

It reminds me, too, of my Father’s Mother, Lillian, who came to Australia as a migrant fleeing Europe after WW1. My Grandmother - a strong, intelligent and loving woman but with a great streak of Lincolnshire stubbornness - took to this country with gusto despite the difficulties all immigrants face. She and my Grandfather fought for Worker’s rights and for the unemployed through the Great Depression and raised my Father as a good man.

As a child my parents often took us on picnic outings with my Grandparents. Nanna would always bring a home baked sponge cake for dessert topped with delicious icing and filled with jam and fresh whipped cream. (I had no idea how such creations were produced. I just assumed these are things that all Grandmothers have in their cupboards).

Lillian also had a massive love of flowers - perhaps inspired by her own name - and on more than one picnic occasion she went for a walk and came back with an armload of flannel flowers - a protected species which it is strictly illegal to pick. My Father attempted to dissuade her - a hopeless task - as Nanna assured him that “there are plenty more of them, George, so they won’t be missed.”

Which was true enough back then, with only 12 million people in the whole continent of Australia, but those times are now long gone. The more of us there are, the more we need to care.

I sit with the flannel flowers, watching them wave in the breeze. I stroke the soft petals gently, and then I walk away.

Climbing around the cliffs to the North East side where the waves are ruling the day, I try to photograph them - and this is the best I can do - but a wave is all about fluidity and no single instant is the truth.

Just as this story of a day cannot possibly be the truth of a life. I can only offer you this selection of moments, this assortment of thoughts, in the hope that they remind you of something.

It is my hope that in reading this you will be reminded of your own tides, your own restless depths, your own wave swept shores.

We all have them. We are all shaped by them. We all shape those around us in how we navigate them.

In a sheltered cove I shed my clothes and enter the sea, letting it lift me and lower me, letting it move me as it moves - the shore bobbing up and down in my view as if it were the ocean and I the unmoving Earth.

Before heading home I scramble back up the hill to sit for a while with the view. It is a truth that - by moving so restlessly - we see much but we often miss the whole.

The ocean is laid out before me and all the arc of the land, and as I sit amongst the flannel flowers and look out to sea I spot a sudden spout of vapour, then another, then a third. The great whale migration is in progress.

For time beyond counting the whales of the Southern Ocean have been migrating up the East coast of Australia every Autumn, to give birth in the warm sub-tropical waters before returning each Spring with their calves, back down the coast, headed for their Antarctic feeding grounds. Now - for this one counted day - I am here to witness their journey South.

As I watch, a massive black shape launches into the air - one fin pointed skyward - before crashing back into the green water in a welter of white foam.

And again.

And again.

Each breach of a whale opens the sea within me. The waves wash. The deeps call. We are all rising. We are all falling. We are all rising again. We are all swimming as best we can through the days we count, one by one, towards our destination.

And this time, again, the sea shall have the last word…. (Volume up)