Take a walk
Walking slowly to find orchids on the upper slopes of Barrm Birrm
When I bought this 5 acres, with its long line of buildings scattered down the slope like a Nepalese village and the mysterious meandering creek hidden under blackberry, I knew that on the other side of the road was a bit of bush that the local Landcare group looked after.
In time, I came to know it as Barrm Birrm, place of many yam roots, and in time, I became one of its caretakers. There’s a complicated story here, of bad land use planning and a painful shift from private to public ownership. We are making progress to better protect this hillside of bush at the southern end of the Macedon Range, but the ground of my commitments there is the place itself. The place has entangled me.
I go walking. I cross the dirt road into town, and step onto the path made by the roos and now marked deeper by humans moving through. Twenty metres in, the fringing vegetation of cassinia opens out to woody grasslands and each time, I let out a little sigh and I feel I’m home. Grasses and lilies and shrubs and two dozen small plants that live close to the ground, they all fall into place. They have worked something out between themselves and it shows. The butterflies take flight ahead of me, the Common Brown, though there’s nothing common about the flicker of light as a score of butterflies lift and toss about.
We each come to Country in our own way. I’m a walker. When I first got here, I couldn’t stop myself walking, in and up and around, impelled by a weird mixture of curiosity and fear, wanting to know the place, all of it. My predecessors in our Landcare group had documented the plants and made a book of what they found, and I each excursion out I turned there to learn the names for plants,
Hakea decurrens.
Acacia leprosa.
Austradanthania geniculata.
But I’m no botanist. To know the name and have it roll easily off my tongue seemed a slight thing alongside appreciating how that moss there is at home under the lee of the wallaby grass, and in turn makes a place for those lichens and that sprout of what might one day be a shrub.
What kept calling me was the land itself, the rise and fall of it, the way the plants all shifted configuration to fit the slope and the weather, so that here where moisture gathered down the hillside was one thing, and ten minutes further up the slope was a different place.
I walked. At first I walked to get somewhere, to go some place I didn’t know so well, to discover the land. But having the place so readily available made the urgency I brought to my walking faintly silly. The place wasn’t going anywhere. It wasn’t in a hurry, it didn’t need to be discovered by my firm step and gleaming eyes.
It was living out its life, as it had been for millennia. I could choose to be preoccupied with being the exotic creature I undoubtedly was, striding through, or back off a bit, tone it down, listen up. Let the place speak to me.
Country is waiting to be spoken to. It waits. It likes the caress of human attention. That’s what I heard the people say, so I allowed that possibility, and kept walking, stilling the chatter of a mind that wants to possess, paying attention in silence.
It’s been twelve years now. Sometimes I walk fast, when there’s business to be attended to, though never as fast as those who measure their satisfaction in kilometres covered. But mostly I walk slow. I come to realise that at a slow pace, the wonder seeps in more readily, and appreciation has space to radiate out. It gets that glow going, that Marika Duczynski and Jazz Money talk about.
I take my sorrow with me sometimes. I walk in lamentation. Why have we take this path? Why have we been unable to hold back? Why, having seen the destruction of the sacred, have we done nothing to stop the violation of the world? What is there for us to reach for now?
Ah, the reaching of the human spirit: is there anyway to fold our insistent intention into a sensing of the way things are?
Country is here, waiting for our quiet attention, or for our companionable shout out as we enter, glad to be back. There are still people with us whose span reaches back to the Ancestors, and the traces of ancestry are still inscribed in the landscape. And there is still our fundamental task as humankind, to care for the land.
I draw assurance from Tyson Yunkaporta, that if you live here, you can be a countryman. Let’s take a walk. Yes, we’re scarred with regret and guilt and the emptiness of a life removed from Country’s embrace. We’re all messed up, but let’s take a walk.
What might Country have to say?