Platypus

The Picnic ~1846 Thomas Cole

I don’t like sharing wild places when I walk. 

Isolation and solitude in the wilderness are something I became addicted to many decades ago, at first in the Nullarbor desert when I was seventeen years old. No wait … the need for isolation and solitude started long before that - in the working-class inner city suburb of Elwood I grew up in. There was no wilderness, desert or far-reaching plain, but there was the rooftop of our single weatherboard house and I was up there often, intuitively running to the highest point like a startled goanna, in order to escape all the brain noise down at the human level. At other times when the Melbourne weather was inclement, which was often, I would climb the rickety wooden ladder in Mum’s sewing workroom to gain access to the only silent tomb available in our overcrowded house, the attic. It was no more than the space between the cross members that held up the lathes and plaster of the high ceilings, and the frames under the pinnacle of the roof.  There was no standing room, even in the center pitch, but my parents had made good use of the real estate by laying old floorboards and sheets of chipboard over nearly every square inch to create storage for the hundreds of bolts of leftover brocades and vinyl materials from their upholstery business and any other thing that fitted through the tiny manhole. 

This was the best place to escape a house stacked to the roof in every room with half-dressed furniture and five kids all born about a year apart. 

If you know about this feeling, this needs to be alone in order to stay sane, you know that we will find it come hell or high water, somewhere, even if its in a cupboard. There is another level to this interface we can have with being alone in a space, that many of us never discover simply because we do not get the chance to experience it.  Many people never leave the city limits, or if they do its in a kind of group or team of adventurers, and think that going for a walk in the bush with other hikers, or in a park or a busy national park in the middle of the day on a walking track is what I mean, but it is not. It feels like wilderness, but there are little safety nets everywhere, to reassure you that ‘a human being’ put up this rail, this sign, or cut this path for us so its all okay. 

We have all heard about the idea of the Australian aborigines going ‘walkabout’.  I imagine this is more so what I am talking about.  It is not a ‘group walk’. It is not a team marathon with many fizzy electrolyte drink stops. It is a deliberate wandering off into the raw wilderness on your own on purpose.

Once you have done this enough, you know that the desire to be in it can’t be changed once it has taken up residence in you as a ‘thing’ you need. You never get over it. It calls you. It dictates your life. You will serve it in how you live your life, and where you live your life. If it can’t be had, you become sickly and anemic like a caged kangaroo who must be able to bound across open planes. You can’t get it in public spaces, like parks or gardens, because the secret between wilderness and solitude requires that you cannot be a sharer of this space.

Today was my last day on Tamborine Mountain, so I opted for the one-hour Curtis Falls walk before I loaded up the car to head back along the concrete slipstream to the trashy Gold Coast. 

 I rose before daylight at four-thirty. I put my running gear on and squeezed in a quick coffee. Daybreak was alive for only thirty minutes by the time I arrived at the empty carpark and the entrance to the national park.  

There are two distinctive experiences for me when it comes to being in ‘the bush’. They are like chalk and cheese. One is blissfully alone, and the other is with others around. The former I am addicted to and cannot live sanely without regular doses of, and the latter I avoid at all costs, in fact - tolerate at best (if the others are my family) - otherwise - abhor.  For some, wandering alone in the wilderness has no appeal at all and might even be seen as evidence of an accident or possibly being lost. I have often wondered why on earth everyone waits until the hottest, busiest or noisiest part of the day to hit the walking tracks or parks. Not only that, they insist on dragging food with them for ‘a picnic’.  Why the hell would you have a picnic in a place where flies are like a cross-breed between kamikaze pilots and pterodactyls; just eat at home or in the car, and things will be far better, believe me. 

 Perhaps they feel safer (maybe because when they are all there … ‘she’ - that frightening presence … is not there - see below). They congregate at crowded beaches and fight for small square inches of towel space when an empty one sits a few miles away.  They squash themselves into piles and corners of concrete pillons and dream about sleeping in small noisy boxes overlooking thousands of other concrete boxes. They swarm in swamps of retail detail or kilometres of queue’s for crappy coffee in cities when they could just make a cup at home. 

But ‘it’s not the same’, they cry, as when Paul or Rinaldo makes it. I am sure it’s more about the name-dropping than the coffee. They mull around each other swimming and hoarding comfort or succor or something I just don’t understand from the mass and froth of itself. It terrifies me. 

It confuses and exhausts me trying to work out why. I have wondered why even before I had deliberately left it behind at sixteen years old to ‘find something else’, that I did not yet know of, but just knew must be out there - and yet they seem to find warmth and comfort in it. I feel like I was born in the wrong world and yet all my calls from the roof of my inner city childhood home, to be beamed up and ‘taken home’ came to naught.

What am I talking about? What is the thing that you may come to know that will not allow you to go back? What seduces you in the wilderness, and glues itself into your psyche, forming a kind of baroque extra sense, that must be satisfied, but which you cannot explain? You find you have a tail curled up in your pants leg, and it’s highly uncomfortable unless you can just let it out to flap around as your real full self, instead of ‘tucking it in’ all the time to fit in.

 Is it insight, or is it just a general distrust of the limits of human beings in crowds and packs? Am I talking about a club of nature elitists, or extremist greenyism? No, because they too flock in packs or bow down to worship that which does not care a fig for their efforts really.

Is it a mental illness?  Maybe, but I don’t care because I ‘know’, what is real, but I know that it is not common, therefore never expect to gain consensus. If it was more common - perhaps we would not be in the mess we are with the environment and our constant razing of it to serve the ‘other’.

And what for? For clean energy scams sanctioned by corrupt and paid off or blackmailed government ministers and stupid gold watch-hunting bureaucrats? So they can dig up rare earth, and turn it into things that poison the planet such as lithium batteries, forcing everyone to buy buy buy, then only to discover they poison the planet at a rate of one hundred times that which an oil-run car does? It’s all a gigantic scam, a rich man’s trick. 

 I have seen Mother Nature’s (or whatever she is) true face hide from people many times; in fact, any time others are around. Perhaps this illusive behavior is why she ends up in trouble and at the mercy of unseeing coveting, reaping, for selfish gain. Miners seem to have special permission to do whatever the hell they want to nature. Rip it up, tear it down, burn it, poison the water, steal the water, ship it all away, and then leave great gaping scars everywhere. Where the people, are given all sorts of guide rails and rules to follow.  Lock it up, the Globalists say!  The One World Government goons, including the United Nation and World Economic Forum full of narcissistic greedy parasites, with their ‘Agenda twenty, thirty, fifty, or whatever fantasy number they deem the number, has stated blatantly they wish to lock up ninety percent of all wilderness from the public and herd the plebs into tiny boxes in tiny cities, and feed them insects and plug their brains into a matrix like gaming existence, (apart from the mining stuff of course as they get the kickback on that). Why bother, why not just wipe them all out?  That might in fact be what they are planning.

Back to Nature, as I am quite sure she has her own plans, which are not plans so much as just shit she does despite man’s plans. 

When there are batches of people who come into her wildernesses, she is wary and stiff. If miners want to go in there and drill holes in her belly, and then scrap out all of her insides, and then pour all their dirty water and crap back into her again, she will not scream or yell.  She will deliver to those who did this, the result. You will go there and see your own filthy work, your own mess, your defamation of her body. How you think or feel about that, she does not even care.  We are a collective in light of Mother Nature. You might be sad and cry, but the miner does not give a fig. Therefore any justice must be fought by the factions. If we are offended, then we have to ‘adjust’ the dirty part of our collective. We can’t save her.  We can only rout out the cancers in our collective that harm the earth that nurtures us. People must regulate people. We do not tolerate murderers, so why do we tolerate those who make our world filthy and dark?

If you love her, and care for her, whe does not roll around in front of you in the dust like a happy horse, and then rise up as high as a mountain, like a cockatoo and flap her wings furiously for the pure joy of the drying off after her bath. She does not shake her giant mane head, ruffling her fur into a big fluffy collar to impress you. She does not scratch the fleas from her ears in front of you - or even me, if others are there. 

You have to be alone, or only with your sniffing dogs to see these things, to feel what its like. Dog’s want to go inside her, they want to play and you can see just how a dog reacts if you take them there, (if you are even allowed these days). They are gleeful and changed because they trust her, and she trusts them too. They are indivisible, even as killers.

The difference is like night and day - to have or to not have. It is the difference between a plastic cow and a real one. Its about temperatures, smells, wet rotting and baking dry things, feather softness, tiny and gigantic prickles and sharp edges. Bristles and silk, hidden small scuttering under mist, thudding and pounding, moaning and peeling, busting apart spraying, pockets of gamy smells where animals have lain and marked, and other things that are not in the barista shop - which is limited to man’s imagination about one or two topics.

 Nothing will cure you of the need to be alone with her if she knows you like this and you know her like this. 

But if others are there, if a young Chinese couple are walking together giggling and taking photos of giant trees or cockatoos, or a happy family are skipping along with sun hats, a tourist bureau map enjoying a day out while they eat Pringles and drink sugar poppas… she does not come. She is there, oh yes, but she hides behind her special masks: a kind of cloak of anonymity with special park ranger sign posts, and painted arrows pointing this way and that - where people should walk, and not walk. 

The rangers probably know about how shy she is because no doubt most of them walk alone many times in her places, doing their work, and so they work for her, and set all this up so she can hide when all the visitors come. 

When they all come, she measures the footfall. One, two or more? If it is not one, who is listening, she pretends she is just big wood, birds and dirt and stuff. She is an actress, and wears her costumes and make up for them, with the nicely paved steep bits and cleared paths. She has a few special party tricks, such as Roger, who is a bush turkey stationed at the corner of tree five hundred and forty three, and he does this thing, where he runs across the scrub, scaring the shit out of the walkers every time, because they think something is coming, something they can’t see, until they see him. There is a hooting owl named Bert located at about positon 762.4 latitude and 6545 longitude, and he does his thing each day and they all think its a ghost as he keeps moving positions so they cant find him, but only hear his haunting hoots floating around the forest. 

She plays the game that the rangers name. This Way to The Falls, This Way to The Lookout, This Way to The Contemplative Spot, This way to The Car Park, Do not go Here, No Entry, Keep Out. Rehabilitation. 1 Kilometre return trip, grade 3.  

This business of how she plays chicken in the presence of those who don’t know her is tricky to understand. You might ask, well how do I get to know her if she disappears when I come to see her?  How will I ever know her properly? Well its very easy. You have to go alone, without any friends or family or travelling groups or tours, and you have to go there, not be going anywhere. If you are scared, so is she. She won’t trust you, and she might smell it like a dog smells fear. She is far more benevolent than a dog though (who might bite you for being scared) and if you give it long enough, and walk in there anyway, even with your fear, but trusting her to sort it out, it will all gradually and then suddenly be good. She has a way of doing that. You just get used to her being around, and then she is your friend. She will let you touch her properly. You can walk over and pick up things and she won’t mind. If you are not at home when you are there, she won’t make you a home until you are home there. Why do I need to go alone, you might ask?  It is because this is when you are not with anyone else but her. That is how you know her. That is how she reveals herself to you. It is all she trusts, truly, deeply. I am not lying to you.

I have to ask you this, and it might help to understand a little bit about why all this is so tricky and yet really so easy. Where do you think you will go when you die? Will you die taking all your gang around you, your car and your iPhone with you? Probably not. You will return to matter - to nature, in some form or another. You will return to her world. No matter what you believe, she will at the very least have your body! So why would you not be at ease with her eternal rotting and sprouting? Why won’t you trust her now, before you have no choice?

To go and sit somewhere, just out in the bush, on the ground, at no place in particular, away from the sign posts is a good start. Lie down, and put your head on the ground, your ear in the dirt and close your eyes. Just check there are no bull ant nests first though. Sit or lay there and wait. 

She will come, she will come creasing in, invisibly at first until she has you surrounded, and it is only an intruder that can make you realise she has had you all the time, because upon the presence of someone else, she becomes silent and evaporates and you will know this if you have known her alone with your full concentration. As soon as you are there on your own again, she comes back. You can learn this by doing it, and observing it, that is all. Most of us don’t even know its possible, that its something in this world to know, to feel, to have in us.

Platypus

Once at the bottom of the rainforest, where the roaring falls should have been but were not (thanks to a record breaking drought), walkers had to cross the stream via twenty feet of rocks and leaps, in order to begin the ascent back up the other side. As I am alone or with my dogs most of the time I am trooping around in the bush, I have learned to be very sure footed to reduce the chances of a stupid slip or fall. Therefore as I descended, I was focused on the space between the rock I was on and the next one, when a flash of something odd appeared in the corner of my eye. I froze and focused more carefully at the little rock pool in front of me. A slug like thing emerged, and yet didn’t really emerge at all. It was as if it was a bubble of dark swollen water moving purposefully and in pace with the current. I felt excited and focused carefully, waiting for it to appear again. There, there it was again, and again, then it went under, and then it slid over the rocks, and down into the next small pool, and the next. I didn’t even think to get my phone out to take a video or photo… I just wanted to watch. Who hasn’t seen one in books and on the TV? It was a platypus, but it was so small. The paddle tail was not huge, but it was a paddle. I could see his little duckbill snout and, just before my last sighting, he rolled slightly sideways to look at me. I saw his eye, but it was ethereal and as if in a dream. There it was, the little hero of the book I have been writing all my life - The Child in The Cave, and the one that I had been pouring over during this trip. The very same escort who would take the child to safety, was here, right in front of me showing me what he really looks like, what he does, how he rolls, how like quicksilver he really is.  

Its as if he is there but he is not there. His body rises up but carries the water over him, so its not seperate…like a freshly laid egg, the yolk sits proud inside the white, but is protected by it. It just rises, this glistening rising body… down, into the little pool, and then through it, and down over the rocks again… he goes. The little raw umber god - who lives above and below, who moves like mercury, so slippery and impossible to catch. He is the little Hermes of the low clear creeks, working away, mysteriously appearing and disappearing and seeing everything. 

It was time to go home.