On the great Southern wind another rain is falling / The sea is high, it’s windy, the waves are breaking on the shore / Thinking about the stories in your country (Shane Howard, ‘Tarerer’ )
Any pilgrimage is at least in part an attempt to move beyond the mundane and the everyday and to experience another more transcendent world, if only briefly. Leaving Geelong and heading west towards the South Australian border, as we did this week, was an opportunity to connect with some ancient history. I always try to imagine the landscape there just as it was 7,000 years ago. This part of western Victoria’s countryside was formed from about 4.5 million years ago until as recently as 7,200 years ago, forming one of the world’s largest basalt plains with more than 400 volcanoes mapped.
You must try to imagine this landscape with none of those very recent housing estates called SeaView Haze or Dunes Retreat or others with such grand nomenclature. No Hungry Jacks or even Bunnings on the horizon. Partly hidden now by these modern ‘lifestyle choices’ is the Western Basalt Plain stretching from Melbourne to Portland and consisting of vast open areas of grasslands, large, shallow lakes, small patches of woodland and stony rises from the once hot lava flows. The low peaks of dormant and extinct volcanoes still dot the landscape.
Still visible are lava ridges and clusters of lava tumuli which are circular mounds of rock up to ten metres high and twenty metres in diameter. This is the only place in Australia where tumuli are found.
The other reason for this week’s little pilgrimage west was to experience the excitement of seeing Southern Right Whales up close, mothers with their newborn calves off the Warrnambool coast. Southern Right isolate themselves from the herd and find a safe place to hide from predators, to give birth to their young. During winter, these whales travel from the feeding grounds of Antarctica to the warmer waters of Australia where they give birth, and stay until around October when the calves are strong enough to return with their mothers to Antarctica. On average, they weight about 50 tonnes and their length will be up to 15 meters with the maximum length of these creatures being 18 meters.
Imagine our excitement arriving at Logan’s beach near Warrnambool to see not just one but two ‘cows’ (female whales) with their calves, breaking the surface occasionally like furtive black submarines. Seeing such magnificent creatures evokes awe and delight and is for me an intimate connection to the primitive energies of our earth. Together with the crowd gathered we gazed mesmerised as if at a religious service.
Aboriginal People along the Australian coast too have a long association with whales. Rock engravings and contemporary stories show the strong relationship between local Aboriginal People, whales and The Dreaming. Some rock engravings and paintings are estimated to be over 1,000 years old. The whale is an important totem for numerous Aboriginal groups.
The Gunditjmara people, still the traditional owners of the Warrnambool district, had a sophisticated system of aquaculture and eel farming as well as of stone dwellings. They built stone dams to hold the water in these areas, creating ponds and wetlands in which they grew Short-finned eels and other fish. They also created channels linking these wetlands. These channels contained weirs with large woven baskets made by women to harvest mature eels.
But alas, as with many parts of Australia, there’s a history here too of massacres and the infamous Eumerella Wars which took place between the Gunditjmara and the colonists for more than twenty years during the mid-nineteenth century.
Tower Hill(or Tarerer), west of Warrnambool, is an important site for the Gunditjmara and also one of the largest Maar volcanoes in the world. A Maar volcano is formed by one or more underground explosions that occur when hot magma comes into contact with shallow ground water to produce a violent steam explosion. These explosions crush the overlying rocks and launch them into the air along with steam, water, ash and magmatic material. The materials usually travel straight up into the air and fall back to earth to form the deposits that surround the crater. Tower Hill was formed in this manner about 25,000 years ago. Inside the three km wide crater are smaller and younger scoria volcano cones. The local indigenous clan lived in a settlement on the edge of the swamp here near the rim of the volcano and would have witnessed its eruption.
Entering the rim of the volcano is like entering a more primitive unspoiled world. Here we immediately saw groups of emus feeding and kangaroos staring curiously at us. The air was charged with a sort of spiritual electricity and the yellow of the wattle everywhere was blinding.
One of my published poems attempts to express this lament for the loss of wild places to development, where supermarket car parks and fake Tuscan housing estates suffocate the primitive energies of landscape and wild-life. For me these connections which still exist are as crucial as fresh air for existence.
BARRE-WARRE – (FROM THE HILLS TO THE SEA)
From the hills to the sea
from those heaven-hugging You-Yangs to the east
they journeyed to the Karafe wetlands behind Pt Impossible
when the shearwater laid eggs in burrow nests
they sat in the soft hollows of the breasted-dunes
on shell-fish feasted — kooderoo, moorabool, and barrabool
on low fires roasted — dora, yabbi and wiitji
the names still echo in the dunes like prayers
their soft footprints in the sand
erased now by the ‘Torquay Sands’ development
eighteen-hole golf course and sleek condominiums rising from the wetlands
where red-eyed bulldozers blink in the dust
whinging-whining seven days a week
with bunkers, greens and a clubhouse
covering the tracks of those Wathaurong
forever gone.
