birds – equineocean

Every day I see Mount Majura from the balcony. Yesterday, I stood on Mount Majura and looked at our balcony. Majura is one of Canberra’s mountains – 888m above sea level; about 300m above Canberra itself.

Here’s some impressions from my walk up Mount Majura.

Hackett Gate and mini-mountains

I set out from Hackett Gate, which sounds rather exciting and adventurous. Casuarina Trail cuts up across the wide track that runs under the powerlines then narrows, climbs and zig-zags up the side of the mountain. I’m glad it doesn’t have a dramatic name like Mount Ainslie’s Kokoda Trail; I already feel disingenuous calling this a mountain if I can walk up in 45 minutes or so.

Quiet in the woodlands

It was windy when I left home, but all is quiet in the lee of the mountain. The south ridge is open box-gum woodland, apparently cleared at some stage (unlike neighbouring Mount Ainslie). Living in a built-up area in Canberra’s north, it feels like I haven’t experienced this much quiet in weeks. Even the birds are silent; including the two crimson rosellas close to the trail on my way up, feeding on grass seeds, bright against the dim green of the bush.

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This town called Eden is just as green and picturesque as the name suggests, but how that wind blows! On the hill north of Twofold Bay, where a hilly outpost of the town is separated from the rest by a narrow, low spit of land between bay and ocean, the wind tears in from the south. The water of the bay is ruffled and bright in the sun.

I am here in Eden with the Endeavour replica and her dark heavy rig stands out against the water of the bay. Yesterday 660 people came aboard the ship to see her and imagine something of life in Cook’s time. This interests me less than the sight of the ship herself and the way tall ships are so entirely unique in filtering into their background of wave or bush and seeming so at home yet centuries out of place.

I remember coming back to Endeavour in the RIB when we were on the Hawkesbury River in September and losing sight of the ship against the headland behind her, so well did she blend into the bush.

On Endeavour, I often think of Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance and the way he describes a ship from the point of view of a young indigenous boy coming into King George Sound in Albany in the nineteenth century, folding away its wings like a pelican coming into land. (I don’t have the book here so I can’t check the accuracy of my memory of the image.)

I thought of Scott’s image as we passed Botany Bay on Endeavour on Tuesday last week on our way south from Sydney. As I wrote on the Australian National Maritime Museum blog for Endeavour, I imagined Botany Bay as it might have been in Cook’s time. I did not expect to see the cranes of a major commercial shipping port silhouetted against the sky on the far side of the bay.

Pelicans coming into land in a bay… and pelicans floating on the wind above us today in Eden. Seventeen pelicans, seeming to move diagonally rather than forwards then circling and wheeling before returning to a formation of sorts then ascending away from us to the south.

It’s been a while since I wrote anything on this blog, but in my absence I have been writing more than usual – for the ANMM’s Endeavour blog, not my own. So far, I’ve written about four voyages on Endeavour and there is one more to come. In some, I could have written many more words of reflection and imagery of the sea, the ship and the wildlife. This post captures just one small element of that which has not made it onto Endeavour‘s blog.

I hope there will be more to come when I am back in Fremantle, with the ocean just visible from the kitchen window.