We find ourselves camped on a private property near the tiny hamlet of Watsonville on the Atherton Tableland. It’s beautiful, jagged granite country with white, dusty soil mixed with an assortment of rocks and boulders that dominate the landscape.
The rocks are everywhere, including angrily jutting through the surface of the ground, the perfect unexpected stopping point for the full stride, misdirected toe. They drop grown men and create a wound that leaves the skin flapping. But the true champions are the boulders – enormous, heavy statues that lay all over.
I am sitting on one of these protruding boulders overlooking a stream, healthily running with ice cold water through tight rapids into large, rippling pools. The water is clear however the brown of the algae on the bottom gives it a colour of deep green, depending on whether the sun is behind cloud or shining directly through.
The stream is part of a wider riverbed, which in full flood would be awesome. It must have been these kind of flows that has placed some of the boulders, bigger than buses, precariously on what seems little to no purchase, grimly overhanging the water with a constant threat of collapse. They sit with intent.
Scrubby grey trees – eucalypts, she-oaks, wiry native bushes and dead skeletons rise out of the bed, some holding the remains of the last flood bent around the base of their trunks. They are a white grey that glows when moonlit.
Grey dominates, but there are other colours apparent after time spent staring. Caramels, whites, light greens, small yellow blossom and an unexpected flourish of red from a tiny shrub that has small, vivid flowers the shape of bells.
The sound is that of the flowing water, that constant soundscape that is the symphony of the combined rapids in earshot. Birdsong also emerges, pretty chirrups and tweets that come from small darting wrens that flicker in and out of view.
Overall, this bush has a great sense of weight. It sits heavily. The flowing water runs through a presence of permanence, stability and strength. There is a feeling of great age to this place, an ancient experience that continues to exist through fire, storms, drought and flood. There’s a raw honesty to it all.
Days pass through here, as opposed to it being a part of the time scape. It’s a fixed space in the ongoing movement of time.
The idea of the Australian bush conjures multiple images, the outback, the ranges, the desert and more. But this is one of the defining images for me. There’s a raw honesty to it. It makes you sit profoundly and just exist. The strength and permanence is likely an illusion – there is an old tin mine not far from here that is being looked at as it may have copper now. But right now, if you get yourself into a quiet spot, surrounded by the imposing boulders, you can pretend you are absolutely and utterly, alone. What a gift.
Big Country 