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Revisiting a site reveals its layers enriching rather than dismantling its secrets and its potency. You take someone there, for the first time, you meet someone there, and that place works its way into your history and into your senses.
The South Eastern littoral shore was the first site we visited as newly named Mudliners in January 2016; a loose knot of curiosity; inquisitive hands; a wary footstep; a first taste of mud as poetic alchemy. We answered a call from the edges of our island, the stark salt marshes, hemmed by unruly mangroves; places both hidden - for they lie beyond human concern - and exposed - for they no longer occupy the interior.
The littoral is vegetated, but low to the ground: tidal salt marsh lawns of Sporobolus, tipped, here and there, with the crisp white carapaces of tiny crabs. Mangroves line the shore that you reach from the bushland entry, leagues away. Here are some of the largest mangroves we have encountered, mangroves with hollow interiors, with limbs that measure the shore, with roots that give shelter from the wind. And a little further north along this line, there is a different copse of mangroves: bleached, broken, scattered like dried bones, somewhere between matter and form. You cannot quite reach the water along this stretch. The closer you come, the further you sink, stirring up dark grey mud into the green tide. You have to choose your steps carefully... and then turn back.
I first came this way a year before, with Jackie, visiting from the US, and Mark. We parked our car at the top of the steep embankment, almost a cliff, from whose exposed ground of ochre and oxide strata we had the clearest view over Minjerriba, a single mangrove island between her western edge and our eastern. We scampered low under casuarina trees, over the soft fawn covering of fallen fronds, and emerged on the other side where the fire trail begins. You could see just how steep it was from there, with nothing but the finest fingers of casuarinas offering themselves as aid.
Two thirds of the way down, we met Herb, walking his large blonde labrador, Rosie. He was a loquacious English chap, who welcomed the contact, told us about his transition from England to Australia, and to the shores of this island. He lived in the house down there, at the end of the trail, just on the edge of the tidal flat. He was, as it happened, writing a book about the mangroves. Come back, he said, sometime, and have a cup of tea. We would meet Alyke, his wife, an artist, a Dutch woman with a passion for these shores. So we did some months later return, and were served tea in their narrow south facing sitting room, gazing down the littoral and over the mangroves until they disappeared from sight. Ducks populated the back yard; a makeshift washing line clung uneasily to its footings; the garden variously struggled and got by. It was all such an oddly domestic setting, in the face of the stark and powerful surrounding of the wide and wild grassy shore. Inside, a large loom was strung in the corner, artworks populated the walls from floor to ceiling, and little objects, transparent and glimmering, hung before the wilderness beyond.
We would see Herb and Alyke on and off over the following two and a half years - the odd visit, or out walking. Alyke volunteers with the rural fire brigade, has a particular intuition for fires and is a big hearted and lively community person, and an artist. Herb was more insular, preferring to stay in, watching over his shores, and weaving them into words. He self-published many books over the years and took hundreds of photographs. Last year he was diagnosed with cancer, and several months later, he was gone. When we visited one last time, he was incredibly frail and possessed by the most acute and powerful emotion. He showed us his books of poetry and of photographs, and tears rolled down thin cheeks and his voice foundered at the wonder of life. All the while we gazed over the saltwater couch grasses, where the hazy atmosphere grabbed at strands of clarity and dissolved them before our eyes. We attended Herb's funeral only a month or so later. Knowing these people has become part of the knowing of this place.
(Photographs of old crumbling boat on the littoral shore by Anna Niblik Heggie)
Between meeting Herb on that walk with Jackie and Mark, and Herb's passing, we visited this place as Mudliners two times: once in January 2016 and again in January 2018. Sarsha Brisbane had joined us by that second time. It was a still Summer day, buzzing with heat and mosquitoes. Sarsha's energy was extraordinary. While I busied myself with makeshift rafts at the tide's edge, pushing through the problems of sinking mud, just to be near the cooling water, Sarsha marshalled huge dead mangrove roots like moose antlers into a rococo barricade. She has an extraordinary determination, seems to know just what job needs doing and hardly appears to notice the discomforts of the climate.
Sharon Jewell: Raft Sarsha Brisbane
While we have made repeat visits to many sites on the island, developing a taste for particular qualities of place, it is here at the littoral shore of the south east that so many differences have accumulated as representative; attention paid equally to the very delicate, the very near, and the robust, and distant. In late August, 2019, I returned again, as guide to the Ensayos collective who visited us in the course of their coastal research. This time I watched them, watching, seeing things through their eyes, and hearing through their ways of hearing as we imitated local sounds and recorded a mounting accumulation of sonic textures, our perceptions and responses growing and developing. We perched in the branches of a massive mangrove and, but for the sandflies, would have forgotten the passing of time.
In order: Tricia Dobson (photo, Jo Dickson); Jo Duncan, painting the mangroves; Sharon Jewell, Raft; Tricia Dobson; Ensayos, recording sounds.
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