fire, the starlight is perfectly adequate.
I walk up to a rock platform overhanging the sky-reflecting water. I let these words out silently, not disturbing the surface, going directly to the stars.
I love being here. I love the free and easy lifestyle. These pools! This pool, fifty metres long and twenty metres wide, curls around a corner and is mostly very deep. To swim with goggles through the great sunlit space beneath its surface! There is a section of huge submerged boulders and fallen trees, and many fish as long as my arm. Today, a turtle mooched beneath me, oblivious. Halfway is a long string of immaculate gems, of pools, beaches, gorges and falls, of salubrious abundance and ease. No mozzies, no crocs. No worries.
It stays warm at night. I’m freckly and burn easily so I wear a hat and big shirt in the sun, but when the sun goes down they come off. I rarely wear pants. I am entirely alone so my nakedness can’t bother anyone. I sleep naked on the bare sand.
My skin comes from my seven Celtic great-grandparents. Independently of each other they all left their ancestral lands and language in the second half of the nineteenth century. That great uprooting was passed in convulsive shocks through my grandparents and parents to me, and is manifest in my rootlessness, the rootlessness of white Australians.
I can’t be in this country without being aware of the people who were here before me, before the whitefella came.
I’ve spent many days on this creek over many years, and I’ve never seen a person here. In other years I have seen boot prints, and I know a bushwalking tour group has come this way. I don’t see footprints other than my own and I don’t run into blackfellas, but there are paintings here and there of turtle and fish and emu, and their presence screams at me.
I don’t want to tell you exactly where I am. I have permission to be here. I come to this ancient aboriginal land as a tourist, a bushwalker.
Over the years I meet people of this country, but I meet them in towns and communities and not out here. Their parents and grandparents and fifty thousand years of ancestors would have come here occasionally, to fish and hang out, to sleep on the beach. The beaches by this pool could sleep fifty people, their dreams intermingling, solidifying into culture, seeping into rocks, rising like smoke to the sky.
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