Anthropocene Daydreams

It’s deep in the AM as I bundle myself into the car, skin still steaming from languishing a little too long under the hot shower - the only thing that can coax me out of bed at 5am in July. Corrugations on the backcountry roads rumble me awake as I listen to the mumble of radio voices. Something about a wild weather warning. Something about military exercises near Taiwan. I’m only half listening, the thread of my attention tugged away by early morning mists pooling in the flats between the dark forested ridges of Rock Valley.  I imagine myself paddling out over it in a little rowboat, sending ripples across the valley all the way over to Larnook on the far side, eddies curling downstream to where Leycester creek weaves its way to Lismore. I could watch all morning as the play of chemistry and thermodynamics swirls the mist around about and up into the winter blue. But the gravel road is studded with potholes that still haven’t been fixed since the summer’s floods, so I tighten my grip on the wheel and fix my attention to the road.

It's a long drive to the worksite in Dyraaba, somewhere north of Casino in the Western ranges of the Northern Rivers, NSW. It’s not a town so as much as a smattering of houses at an intersection, huddled together in an ocean of paddocks and old plantations. Only recently have I taken up work in a bush crew,  wrangling weeds and planting trees into abandoned cow paddocks and drainage ditches. We work long days, lugging spraypacks and brushcutters up and down hills, pants tucked into our socks to stop the ticks from wending their way up our legs. Often I arrive home at dusk hair-matted and mud-splattered, no energy left to stretch out the tightness in my shoulders.

Yet it has also been fascinating to get to know the landscape from the many varied contours of the Northern Rivers Caldera. On sunny days, I roll out my picnic rug at lunchtime in a dappling of light and sip tea from my thermos, looking up at the clouds as they coil themselves around the protruding hilltops. On rainy days, I venture out in my rubber-duck-yellow raincoat and my dear, trustworthy gumboots – the ones I was handed on the tinnie during the flood – invincible to the cold and wet and snakes. Parting the tall siteria grass with my steel shovel, raindrops scatter like grasshoppers and I linger behind the others as we cross creeks and muddy bogs so I can squelch in the mud and look for frogs.

Today we’re planting 1000 trees as part of a scheme funded by NGO dollars to create new koala corridors, the buzz word in the NSW environment sector. Millions in funding is being thrown into habitat creation in support of the State Government’s target to double the population by 2050, even as they continue to log their habitat in proposed National Parks.  “If we can’t even save the koala,” I heard a spokesperson exclaim at a recent symposium “What does that mean for everything else?” The audience shifted uncomfortably in their seats.

I turn onto Summerland Drive and greet the Richmond River as she twists south with the elegance of a snake, unperturbed by the asphalt and steel that we have so determinedly hemmed her in with. Such confidence to build at the river’s edge, as though we could dictate how her waters may flow through the landscape. We forget that she’s alive, and she’s lithe, the flicker of a human lifespan too fleeting to see her dance.

The river is lined by paddock upon paddock of cattle, many of which are inadequately fenced off. Weeds choke the narrow riparian zone which falls away into scoured banks tangled with barbed wire and old fence posts hanging precariously above the water. I catch sight of a little black calf perched on a ledge, looking down into the churning waters bellow. I wonder if it knows that the river is unwell, if even with its freshly opened eyes it can see that the cut-away banks and the algae blooms and the sediment load are indication of a system that is sick. I peel my gaze away from the eroded banks and return to the road, but my mind is wandering back to last year’s spring.

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I remember one muggy afternoon, how my body ached after planting and mulching in the hot sun. How I was tired and filthy and full of thoughts and so I found my way to the ocean to wash off the day. I scrambled to the top of the steep escarpment, which dropped away into a narrow strip of beach where the waves clawed at the sand. An established coastal dune system will normally have multiple dunes in various stages of ecological succession. Only spinifex and other hardy grasses will dare to grow on the foredune, bearing the brunt of the salty sea spray and ocean winds, whilst coastal forest covers the hind dunes where the sand has been stabilised for long enough for seedlings to establish. I peered nervously down at the twisted roots of the banksia and pandanus which hung naked in the air, the sun-bleached bones of a once-thriving ecosystem.

They say that sandy beaches will slowly disappear as climate-change induced storm surges accelerate the process of coastal erosion. The IPCC point our attention to melting glaciers and shattering ice sheets, predicting a rise of 1.1m in sea level by 2100 – a conservative estimate. I wonder if we will heed warning when it is not coastal dune systems but ocean-front mansions, built with that familiar dose of human hubris, which hang perilously over the waves?

To the ocean, to the ocean, I stumbled down the steep path painfully aware that my every footstep, too, was wearing the dune thin. Thousands of years of formation grain-by-grain disappearing in a handful of decades, the sands of time claimed back by the sea. I stripped bare and collapsed into the waves, let my body go limp like a child in the arms of its mother. I let them thrash me, tussle my hair and throw me from my feet. Remind me of how inconceivably small and fleeting I am.

It was the ocean’s depths that nurtured the first stirrings of complex life on planet Earth, and it is the ocean where microscopic phytoplankton still diligently produce half of the world’s oxygen. She has carried the burden of our excesses, absorbing the trapped heat from the sun and 30% of the greenhouse gases that we belch into the atmosphere. Yet she suffers for it through the crippling effects of acidification, a process occurring faster than any time in the last 66 million years. When dissolved, CO2 dissociates into acidic molecules and reduces the availability of carbonate ions, the building blocks which marine organisms such as crabs and corals and phytoplankton rely upon to form their shells and skeletons. With brittle bones, they dissolve back into the waters from which they emerged.

When I finally pulled myself from the sea’s grasp, the sun had begun to set and to my right, of course, some sort of product photo shoot was taking place. An impossibly beautiful woman, draped in pastel coloured linen, writhed on the sand. Her bronze body shimmered, lower lip quivered, and I admired the silhouette she drew with her arms and her hips and her waist as I wrapped a towel around my own sun bruised and blotchy limbs. Her hair fell in rivulets about her face as she stared voraciously into the photographer’s lens, kneeling in the hollowed-out skeleton of the dune. I could almost hear the cogs of the machine whirring, feeding the beast of consumerism with the insecurities and desires of the have-nots and have-not-yets.

Tick, tick, tick - my mind flickers through the memory until suddenly a rail dashes across the road, long legs and tail flicked up, dark and sleek and ridiculous. I swerve wildly to miss it, then swerve wildly back to avoid a pothole, spilling my coffee on my lap. Expletives tumble out of my mouth and I laugh at myself.

-

I finally pull up at the site for work, and park beside a blue weatherboard cottage with ornate cornices and an abundantly fruiting lemon tree is stooped over like an old woman burdened with produce for market. I pull my felt hat down over my plaits and head out the back gate to a sprawling fig tree where the rest of the crew is gathering around the seedling trays. There’s cheery mornings and howzit goings but I’m too swept up in my own thoughts to put on chipper today. It is a beautiful ridgeline, with a view down into a valley and out over the treed hillocks. The arms of Wollumbin Volcano stretch across the landscape, and we pick out Bar mountain and Mount Burrell perched on the horizon.

The wind is picking up, tussling the galahs which have congregated on the powerline on this rather exposed ridge. The tiny rainforest and eucalypt seedlings rest heavily in the harness on my hips and demand attention to balance and precision of footfall. I plunge my metal shovel into the soil, wiggle it in as far as it will go and then leverage it with all my body until the grass roots snap and the soil clump pops out of the ground. I rummage in the pouch of my harness for a seedling, and tuck it into the ground, carefully pressing in clods of earth about the stem with the toes of my boots. I feel like Dorothy in the land of Oz as she rises on tippy-toes and taps her heels together. “There’s no place like home” I tell the seedling, stem erect and fresh growth velvety as a wallaby joey’s ears. But the ridgeline is dry and the clay soil clumps together stubbornly. I apologise to the little lophostemons as I try and crumble the soil around their roots. So pumped up on water and fertiliser from the nursery, it will be a rude shock as they must learn to penetrate the compacted earth of the exposed paddock.

We gather for morning tea beneath the lone fig, hauling over our eskies and setting up our camping chairs on the grass like a sproutness of mushrooms. Someone makes excited noises through a mouthful of sandwich and points out across the valley – a duet of wedgetail eagles loft down over the paddocks, each one on either side of an air current, spiralling down and then back up on their elegant, toothed wings. We speculate what they are on the hunt for – rabbits, snakes? - when one suddenly dives and we all gasp and ponder in silence the majesty of this bird of prey. This expression of lifeways so precise in its execution, so impeccably shaped by time and evolution to drift and dive.

It is this familiar feeling of awe I found hiking through the Antarctic Beech forest deep in the Border Ranges, one of the last remnant ecosystems of the supercontinent Gondwana. Here, water springs up out of the ground, epiphytes hang like chandeliers from the distant canopy and towering strangler figs swallow up fully grown rainforest trees. Probably the only reason these old growth figs remain there is that they're no good for timber, unlike the Red Cedar and the Rosewood. They were forced to bear witness to the felling of their kindred rainforest species.

I went in search of stillness to this place which only 100 years before would have echoed with the felling of ancient trees. Those intricate webs of life that took countless millennia coming to be, where life has been carried in its precarious, shifting, mosaic of decay and germination and rainfall and windspeed and gravity. In the places where the saws failed to reach, you can reach out and touch this deep time, feel the pulse of whatever it is that propels onwards the momentum of the metabolism of life. It’s almost intimidating to realise that we share a planet with life as exquisitely kaleidoscopic, leaving me feeling somewhat bashful as a modern human: paralysed by indecision in the supermarket aisle, driving in circles around shopping centre parking lots, my focus stuck to my screen like chewing gum to a shoe.

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Once all the plants are tucked in we mulch them with imported jute matts from Bangaldesh, pegged into the ground using heavy steel prongs possibly mined from this continent itself. Yet still they flip and flop in the wind, snapping the fragile stems of the littlest seedlings. Every now and then I find a little treasure embedded in the jute, a shimmery lolly wrapper or skerrick of newspaper, snippets of sentence in some other alphabet all triangles and curls. I pocket these secret messages, and wonder about where the matts were made. If women my age were also up at the crack of dawn for work. If they, too, knew the suffering of a flood.

When we stop for lunch, I look up Bangladesh on my phone. It’s a low-lying delta country encircled by India and Myanmar, home to 160 million people – an inconceivable number for my little human brain to comprehend.  It’s braided together by hundreds of river networks, and over 1 million hectares are affected intermittently by flooding. Seawater incursions lace the soil with salts, causing crops to wither and permeating into the water table, making water undrinkable and causing skin infections. And of course it is the women who must walk many kilometres daily to collect water from wells that are drying up as the snow melt from the Himalayan glaciers lessens year upon year. I take the jute-messages out of my pocket and peer at them on the palm of my hand. 

By 3 o’clock, all 1000 of the little trees are in the ground. Through some confounding balance of wages and hectares and productivity, the contractor has calculated that one third of them will die in the next year and still the business charges onwards under the banner of ‘success’. As I lug my gumboots and toolkit to the car, I feel heavy. Confused. Resigned. I can’t shake it and don’t want to go back home to wallow on my own. So I turn left, following the road toward Casino, the less than picturesque regional town famous for its annual ‘beef week’ fair. On the edge of town, past the high school and the miniature railway museum, lies the Jabiru Geneebeinga Wetlands. A friend told me that they once saw a Jabiru here: a tall, black-necked stork with silly long red legs, like those of someone who has dozed off sunbaking at the beach in peak summer.

With a book underarm I find a patch of mottled sunlight between some melaleucas at the edge of a clearing. I make an attempt at reading but my attention is scattered, so I lie on my side and watch a family of red-backed fairywrens hop about looking for crumbs of lunches past. I think of all the birds I have seen today: there was the rail that sprinted across the road, the galahs perched on the powerlines, the wedgies that lofted down the valley. There is a part of me that so desperately wants to be like the birds – effortlessly fulfilling their ecological niche whether they know so or not. Eating insects and berries and disseminating rainforest seeds and nutrients. Scratching for insects in the dirt or building mounds to sing atop, turning over the leaf litter, cycling nutrients through the surface soil, and helping seeds to germinate. They are too small and short lived to be fully aware of the impending reality of climate change, with all its many muddied layers.

Instead I am big clunky human. I locomote in a hunk of metal and lie in the sun in my polyester jumper eating tuna from a can, caught by some unnamed person in some unnamed place. I don’t even know what the fish looks like. Who caught it. How many there are left. Even as I strive to play an ecological function, to respond as the planet’s immune system and help to reforest the hillslopes and riverbanks, I find myself spiralling – is this working? Are we already too far gone? I so desperately want to feel like I am giving back to this Earth System that provides endlessly for me. I squirm, fearing that I take more than I return, the woes that she faces too wicked for me to unpick.

The day is flagging and the mosquitos have come to play, so I hoist myself up and wonder back to my car. I find my way to the highway, climbing the gears and following the dotted lines homewards with unseeing eyes. Words ricochet against the inside of my skull - snippets of thoughts which jostle against one other as they vie for my attention.

I can’t drive like this.

I pull off the road beside a paddock of pasture where I can lie back on the bonnet of my car. The conductor of the sunset has begun to orchestrate the melting of the purples into oranges into reds.  With the whoosh of each car that speeds past my hair whips about my face and I watch the ripple of the ryegrass and paspalum. Slowly, slowly, and then all at once, the flying foxes of Lismore begin their nightly foray in search of nectar in the eucalypt forests which clothe the hills. Their silhouettes are dark against the velvety sky, and I want to take hold of it and wrap it over my shoulders like a cloak. The weight of it all is at once comforting and warm yet also so immense that I feel immobilised beneath it. The burden of the knowledge of how very vast the universe is, rapidly expanding so that the pockets of matter become ever more distant form one another as time arcs away from the Big Bang. How can we propose to untangle the physics of the universe, but not be able to plant trees so that they will survive?

Maybe this is all Eve’s fault, eating that apple from the tree in the garden. The insatiable human hunger for the why, why, why. Our curiosity driving us to dissect reality into thin slivers and probe for answers under the microscope. How thrilling to understand, to look inside the double helix of our DNA and find ourselves woven together with all other life inside our very cells. But equally, as we gaze up at the sky we see not a blanket of stars and stories but the deep, black vastness of the void and this thin little scrap of atmosphere that keeps us in and the asteroids out. We are tearing at the seams, choking the air with smoke and smog and picking apart the very fibres of the systems that sustain us.

The wave of flying foxes ebs and flows as they diligently go out seeking the nectar of the eucalypt blossoms, transferring pollen from flower to flower as they go. Without grief, without hope – they are driven by the pure necessity of sustaining life. It is not a question of should- it is a mustness. They must go out to feed every night, even as their habitat dwindles down to small pockets, and the increasing summer heat simmers them in their skins. There is no other choice but to be part of the whole, to contribute to the pulsating brilliance of it all even as the long shadows of the Anthropocene casts darkness over the days in wait. It took 13.7 billion years to make it here, to become as it is, and maybe it’s not my place to dispute it. I let the bats carry off my thoughts, one by one, so I am left with nothing but That Big Feeling. I can find the words for it later, but for now I will bathe in the tangerine glow of the embers of the day.

Shortlisted for the Lord Mayor's Creative Writing Awards 2024