Tag Archives: Napoleon Reef

The esky in front of the post office

danger_eskyThere it was, an esky. Just a small esky, sitting on the footpath outside the Bathurst post office. Next thing you know, the whole street has been cordoned off and there are cops everywhere. The cops don’t want to touch it, lift the lid. They do a bit of thermal imaging on it, from a distance. Looks like it’s empty. It’s probably empty.

Eventually, after some hours, the all-clear. It’s just an esky.

All the way through this adventure, the police referred to it as a “suspicious package”. That sounds more important, more fearsome, than esky. Esky is a friendly little word, redolent of backyard barbies, camping, car-race watching. “We are concerned about a suspicious package,” sounds more dignified than: “We are concerned about an empty esky.”

But these are days of terror, and people are twitchy.

It would appear there’s no actual terror around here. I just went to the playing fields with Bertie, under a big blue sky with fluffy clouds. I stopped at the Visitors’ Centre cafe to grab a coffee, tying Bertie to the bike rack. The waitress ran out with a white plastic jug of water to pour into the dog bowl, because it’s a hot day. It was only in the car on the way home, coffee in the holder, Bertie panting in the back, that I was reminded about the terror. “Paris has seen terror before but not on this scale,” came the sound of a BBC reporter’s voice.

What complete nonsense that sentence was. Paris has known terror before, and on a far grander scale than last week’s atrocity. There was, for example, The Terror, the days of heads rolling away from the guillotine during the French Revolution, the same revolution celebrated every July 14. The war on Jews in Vichy France. And in October 1961, the massacre of 200 Algerians marching in favour of their country’s independence from France. Deep in her heart, Paris knows all about terror.

Terror is being perpetrated all the time, in many parts of the world, mostly affecting non-white residents of countries that don’t capture our imaginations the way Paris does. Paris is a mental home away from home, so we’re twitchy.

Meanwhile, with attention focused on the suspicious esky, Bathurst Regional Council was voting Yes to a quarry at Napoleon Reef. Local residents who had fought for eight months against the proposal – citing loss of biodiversity and negative impacts on a residential area – watched as the motion was moved by Coote, Seconded by Aubin, supported by Westman and Morse.  North abstained (non pecuniary interest) and Hanger voted against, giving a final vote of 4 to 1.  Councillors Bourke and Jennings were absent.

At the same time, the latest State of the Environment report was tabled, in which the importance of local biodiversity was underlined. Clearly, we are to process such information in different parts of the brain. Quarries are to be dealt with in the “economy” part of the brain; “biodiversity” is to be dealt with in the abstract, feel-good, environmental part of the brain. This means you can vote for a quarry that will destroy a fragile environment at the same time as you express support for biodiversity – as a concept. This allows you to hold competing ideas in the brain at the same time without falling into the abyss of cognitive dissonance.

I’m totally pissed off, to be honest. ISIS terrorists are getting everyone to play right into their hands. Paris is all about terror, now, swamping media coverage in the lead-up to the crucial climate change talks. Facebook is awash with people throwing up their hands and giving up on the human race, the sort of nihilism that makes you turn to sites like Cake Wrecks for relief (as I did last night, for an embarrassingly long time). Polls in Britain are supporting on-ground war against Islamic State. And here in Bathurst, we don’t just pave paradise, we dig another bloody great big hole.

But there is hope. Here’s Jack Black and current Internet cat sensation, Lil Bub, urging us to send a message to Paris:

 

Being here

Mt Panorama, Bathurst, in the middle of the Antarctic vortex, Sunday July 12, 2015.

This blog post is coming to you from the midst of a polar vortex. That’s right, we are living through a weekend of weather that is visiting us from the Antarctic. It is cold. There is snow. (Note to my northern hemisphere readers: yes, we do think tiny scraps of snow are a big deal.) Actually, here in South Bathurst, it’s not anywhere near as enchanting as it is in surrounding districts, where the snow is staying on the ground, turning everything into fairyland. It’s just dark and cold and raining on and off. Today Steve and I drove to the top of Mt Panorama to take Bertie for a run. On the way up, we saw hundreds of sulphur crested cockatoos standing in a paddock, looking cold. They – along with their cousins, the little correllas – have been hanging around town for few days, some sort of cockatoo convention. Up on top of the mountain, we got out of the car and the cold air attacked my face, freezing my sinuses. It made me think of a winter in Prague, many moons ago, when I walked across a couple of suburbs to our soviet-era flat in the dark, in December, and my face just about froze off. (That was when I was with Steve the First.) Bertie leaped out of the car and bounded about, invigorated. I picked up five vintage ring pulls for my collection. Always rich pickings after it rains.

This is where I live, now. At the foot of Mt Panorama, known for thousands of years as Wahluu, not far from the Macquarie River, known for thousands of yeas as the Wambool.

I live here, but these days I’m always cross-referencing back to Carnarvon, where I lived as a child and teenager. It’s so easy to do this, now. There’s a constant drip of information coming from the I Grew Up in Carnarvon Facebook group. Time collapses. In the middle of winter I can keep one part of my mind in the sunshine that pours down on the red earth and the glittering Indian Ocean; a place where snow is just an idea. As I write this, it’s 19 degrees Celsius in Carnarvon (it’s 3 degrees, here). At the moment Carnarvon is witnessing a mass break-out of native burrowing bees. The shire council has blocked off the road to allow the bees to do their thing. The Facebook group, made up of residents and ex-residents alike, is following along as Antoinette Roe gives updates on progress. These bees are new to me. I never knew them when I actually lived in Carnarvon. But I did know the bird flower and the chiming wedgebill (the “Did y’ get drunk?” bird), two local living things that are often reminisced about on the site.

I’ve been living here in Bathurst for over ten years. Gradually, I’m getting to know the plants and animals that live here. I’m actually on a forced march at the moment, having dobbed myself in to help organise an exhibition of local plants and animals for later this year. The other day, I went out to the launch of a new landcare group at Napoleon Reef, about fifteen minutes out of town on the road to Sydney. You turn left off the highway, follow the road to the end, and park. It’s a matter of walking down – quite a steep walk down – into the reserve. That day, cold but sunny, the white trunks of gum trees stood all around us. Aboriginal elders Dinawan Gerribang (aka Bill Allen) and Jill Bower performed a smoking ceremony and dabbed us all in white ochre to celebrate the group’s beginning.

With a little fire going, Bill said the smoking ceremony was a way of expressing yindyamarra. He said this Wiradyuri word means “respect, honour, go slow, be polite and be honorable about it.” He said this sort of respect was not just for each other but for “everything around us”.

Bill Allen at Napoleon Reef

He said Europeans came to this land and saw timber and grazing land, whereas Aboriginal people were steeped in the idea of yindyamarra.

“That’s what people have to understand,” he said. “We had two completely opposing types of ideas on how to use the land.”

He said Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people could try to work together by building a bridge. “That’s what the Bathurst Aboriginal Community Elders are wanting to do, is build that bridge.”

He said he preferred the word “bridge” to the word “reconciliation” because “there was never ever any relationship with each other in the first place. It was just, one lot was already here and the other lot come here on their boats and they just clashed with each other over the land.

“So, I can’t call it reconciliation. We’d prefer to use the term bridge- building so we get an understanding of each other so then we can connect, which is what a bridge does.”

As he used bunches of eucaplyptus leaves to create a thick, billowing smoke, Bill said it was important to do a smoking ceremony as you go into a new area in the bush. “It’s to show respect to the spirits, it opens your mind so you can see what’s around you.”

There were bittersweet moments in the ceremony, with reminders of a dispossession that wasn’t so very long ago and the vastly different socio-economic position of the small Aboriginal group standing behind the fire and the group of mostly white middle-class homeowners and landowners assembled in front of it. Bill said he loved to be on the land, but he didn’t own any. And then there was an old memory from school, of being chided for not turning up, for “going walkabout”.

“I say to people, well youse go walkabout more than I do because I can’t afford to go on holiday. You’ve got a big caravan you take it all up there wherever you go. That’s your little sacred site!”

He ended his speech by urging us to be more considerate of nature. “We want to take out all the resources and make it all for the now and make ourselves feel like we’re important more than everything else. Well, we are important, but we’ve got to remember that everything around us, too, is important.”

After this gentle lecture, we were invited to walk through the smoke and then to get three dabs of wet white ochre on the forehead. It was wonderful to walk through that smoke and to receive my dabs, so generously given. I’ll never really be a local here, but it made me feel so much more a part of this place.