Small settlements
Published on 10 October 2024
By John Bennett
Easter Sunday, Woolgoolga, NSW
1
The air spits monochrome over Emerald Beach,
cresting waves milk spume and briefly hold their breath.
Quicksilver snares Solitary Island, a jut of kangaroo
pricks his ears and holds the composition together.
It’s a wild scenario – the untamed Pacific (plus surfers)
and sheer, knurled cliffs, but Eastern Greys stay close.
In well under two centuries, they’ve lost their fear
as prey and graze intimately with passers-by.
The water’s dishevelled, there’s no point looking
for the Hawksbill or Green Turtles observed last time.
That sky was cobalt, rich as an apothecary jar
and a Diamond Python flowed over our path.
Such memories spark transparent desire for reality
and simplicity with snakes at home in the garden.
2
We continue north to Woopi where the headland
feeds a spindly, fairy-tale stand of casuarinas.
Our salty, elemental church promises surfers
riffling wave after wave, a perfect one, one day.
The beach drags nippers to a squiggle for the race,
lifesavers ride past checking the rips, planting flags.
Under crumpled cloud two dozen sharp bills
briskly probe a spring mattress of fresh Brown Kelp.
Maddey says people complain, but seaweed is no weed.
She dries kelp on her washing line and makes a soup.
Spooked, the Ruddy Turnstones eject, skid low,
bank back, striking black and white stencilled Vs.
They drop onto a basalt spine and wait for us to pass.
They are waiting to migrate to Siberia any day now.
Their handfuls of feathers will embark on a journey
of six thousand kilometres with no stops, and then more.
Our mission is water trapped in dark glassy rock
where small skittering fish centre attention –
Stripeys, black-spot greys and an aqua brilliance,
camouflage discarded, shadowing the overhangs.
Noise from these mirrored realms, breath sounds,
fins-swish, calls or cries are smothered by breakers,
the big hitters. At sea-level it’s all about the eye, baroque
tapestries, uncompromising furnishings often shifting,
a convoluted approach almost Modernist, veering
between representation and outright abstraction.
The reflect/refract flux frustrates focus, a Waratah Anemone
mouth stuffed with carmine tentacles, goes with the flow.
A toddler chucks a spiral skeleton, a big Turban shell,
into splash and giddy ripples. They make him happy.
The spatter casts me fifty years to English minnows
ricocheting between the barnacles and periwinkles.
Among pop-able black Bladderwrack and spongy, yellow
egg cases of the Whelks roamed young green crabs
I would pocket, add wet seaweed and pet for a day or two
then return. I loved them – mortality rate unknown.
A Purple Swift-footed Shore Crab stares back, motionless,
a complete stranger, colours carve up the meagre light.
Spotted Sea Hares sway to their own rhythm, lobes
and tentacles drift a spectacle of world-class camouflage.
Even limpets leave their moorings, in slow motion,
hunger is never tamed, grazing is continuous.
Time strays and scatters in their dumb umwelt, but
words would wash away in the rip, the ram and drag.
After all, for all the verbiage and prolix lexicons
on the tip of our screens, what do we do with it all?
Having lost gills, we pump eight litres of sweet air
down every minute, like most things, without thinking.
Zoanthids, a colony of Polythoa, spineless coral polyps
weave carpets from a paradise of affiliated medallions.
Sea lettuce, a hymn to Earth’s brightest green, tastes
salty from warm amniotic waters feigning transparency.
Attention is worship, environment is the altar,
a vast multitude of tight textures circulating truths.
The Mulberry Whelk, a carnivorous grid-roller design,
drills through a victim’s shell and injects sulphuric acid.
A single chiton in medieval armour or alien uniform
sticks, too many nose-dived in the recent downpours.
Rock pools are radiant confusions with tidal emphasis,
one wave nearly lugs me, clumsy and unpredictable.
The cavities breed walls oozing life, an alchemy
protects the meticulous gardens from a brutal ocean.
Sanctuaries radiate the spin and dart of juveniles
waiting for the chance to escape gastropodic creep.
The territories grow forests and pasture, are there cities?
Is suburbia lurking in a corner? (We are inept inhabitants)
Each oasis has its own performances, its own history
its own heaven/haven, and at night its own constellation.
And each has its ouroboros swallowing the present
until the sea rides climate change over the ramparts.
A slender tentacle reaches out pursued by the octopus,
a few months old, spilling across the dance floor
snaking arms out then contracting them, stretching
Newton’s 3rd law of motion with muscles braced
on fluid not bone. The Gloomy Octopus dissolves
into its rubbled lair constructed from shell and algae.
One rupture wedged into sea is filled to the brim
with Neptune’s Necklace, pale shade balls on a dam.
Photographing the beads, the ground drops from under
my feet, rotten timbers, thin ice, as if I was skating
my arms windmill, camera raised high. The impulse is
to save the machine! I was lost but somehow saved.
Since when is concrete conglomerate geological?
Casually out of place, plastic pipes are obscene remnants
of a sizeable jetty for timber town trade, disintegrating
after the war, after the forests were stripped of Red Cedar.
Is the future fixed for this unlikely planet? Species picked off
one by one as development strangles the remnant pools.
~A poem inspired by the Coffs By Nature Rocky Shore Explore ~
Notes:
Woolgoolga (AKA Woopi) (‘wiigulga’, Gumbaynggirr for the black apple tree) is north of Coffs Harbour, NSW. I had enjoyed a rocky shore ecology course with the WEA in Sydney in the early 80s. I recall an American tutor obsessed with tube worms, but have forgotten too much and lost my notes. This was a Coffs By Nature event, ‘Rocky shore Xplore Woopi’.
Ruddy Turnstones
After twice completing a 27,000 km journey around the world twice, one ruddy turnstone has well and truly earned a lifetime of frequent-flyer points. Researchers tracked the migration of four ruddy turnstones (Arenaria interpres) from Australia to their breeding grounds in Siberia. The turnstones were found to fly non-stop from Australia to Taiwan, a distance of about 7600 km, in just six days.
Sea Hares
These were Spotted Sea Hares (Aplysia argus), one of 16 species in NSW alone. Also known as Black-spotted Sea Hare, Black-tailed Sea Hare, Indo-Pacific Sea Hare, Nudibranch, Ringed Sea Hare, Ragged Sea Hare, Rang’s Sea Hare, White-speckled Sea Hare, and just in this language of English.
Octopus
This was the common Sydney octopus (Octopus tetricus), known as the Gloomy Octopus, named after its droopy-looking white eyes. It can grow to about 80 centimetres). Females sometimes cannibalise the males following mating.
The octopus needs three hearts to pump the viscous blue blood of copper and each of its eight arms contains its own ‘mini brain’. An octopus has as many neurons as a dog around 500 million. About two thirds are located in the arms. The rest fill a doughnut-shaped brain, wrapped around the oesophagus.