Waterfall

[Found poem: ‘Waterfalls of the Otway Ranges’, by Anthony Car, 1^st edition, 2021.]

Waterfalls can be dangerous places and you should always keep this in mind. Water and rock can be a slippery combination which can easily lead to injury. Carry a first aid kit. Expect mobile phones to be out of coverage at some areas. The river has carved and formed several deep gorges with rapids, cascades and waterfalls that are truly spectacular. Small cascades are covered by logs which have piled up in front of it, collected there from when the river was in flood. Another flow can be seen emerging from a side tributary. A tributary forms a wonderful waterfall with a great height and is particularly impressive when the rainfall has been plentiful. Sometimes they leap into an abyss. There are wonderful still pools and water nooks flounced in hartstongue maiden hair and star-fern. What cannot be seen from the lookout are the other tiers that exist above. They are not accessible by any track. The falls are not as well-known. In fact, the name was in danger of disappearing altogether. This may be due to it being less visited, tucked away, and not as big. (I used a slow shutter speed to create the swirl in the pool.) Please note that this area is steep and dangerous and not to be attempted by the inexperienced. Finding some of the forgotten and named waterfalls later was in retrospect fortuitous. Some moments come together and can be quite rewarding. A satisfying flow. Perpendicular rock. Cool verdure. Waterfalls can also be quite peaceful, like watching a campfire. That is why it is beneficial to spend time at each waterfall watching it as it changes throughout the day. Babbling down its stony course. Cliffs towering above. Great gums towering. Sunlight striking on the treeferns. Exciting and risky scrambles. The falls, due to their difficulty of access, remained somewhat esoteric for some time. The spray of water. Noise of falling water. A grand experience. A giant colourful boulder perched on top, whereby the water sneaks through the tiny gap underneath. Adds to the charm and appeal of the setting. Literally a scenic gem. A great asset to our State. The name derived from an Indigenous word meaning by the sea. Some waterfalls need to have the right amount of flow rate to look at their finest. High streamflow caused by prolonged soaking rains. Standing at these locations is both an inspiration and privilege. Fanning as it progresses. Map reading and scanning is a further joy to develop allowing you to find these hidden treasures. Innumerable gullies. The lucid stream dimpling with smiles, then breaking into wreaths of creamy foam. A forest primeval dropping over some broad and shallow ledges. Glittering in the light. Darkening with a green gloom. Falling into a pretty basin. The area is steep and gorgeous but also highly dangerous. They are now called Galliebarinda, coming from an Aboriginal word meaning waterfall.

Sea

 

Yesterday the sea was a bristling flatness, thousands of tiny whitecaps and cat’s paws under duress of the west wind. Today the rains have come, turning all sights into grey rainfall to the shore, then temporary calm and its rainbows, then more rain setting in. Tomorrow above the Great Ocean Road I might spend time watching ships on the horizon, surfers under curls, dogs on the shore, if the rains go. Josep Pla, on the other hand, has trouble understanding what people find in the open sea that they can spend so long staring at it. He interviews a fisherman who spends more time staring at the sea than anyone else. When Pla pushes him about why he does this for such lengths of time, the fisherman replies, “I don’t know … I couldn’t say …” Pla calls this practice an enigma. One time he tries out Aeschylus’s phrase “The sea, ineffable smile,” on another old salt, only to be rebuked with “Have you ever seen the sea smile?” Pla concludes, this may be no more than a literary turn of phrase, a futile fiction. He refers to Lord Byron’s adjectives for the sea, in the French translation. And his Catalan hero Eugeni d’Ors, aka Xenius: “The sea, in its stark nakedness.” This puts me in mind of other short definitions, for example Marianne Moore’s forbidding poem on the subject, entitled ‘A Grave’. James Reeves says “the sea is a hungry dog,” and any amount of ink has flowed on what Homer means by “the wine dark sea.” Leaving us to come up, like Pla, with our own very short definitions of this vastest expanse on Earth. His diary of 1918-1919 ‘Quadern Gris’ (‘The Gray Notebook’) was finally translated from Catalan nearly one hundred years afterwards. I wonder if he ever softened towards the sea? He finds it horrible, without beauty, tiresome, “a harsh, horrendous form assumed by nature.” One wonders if, aged 22 on the day of this entry 30^th September 1919, he is not indulging in youthful playful dispute, honing his wits with university friends in Barcelona. If you must get into dialectic on a subject, what bigger or graver than the sea? “The open sea on its own is horrendous, oppressive, and unpleasantly sterile,” Pla writes, an unusual position to take if you think most of life came out of the fertile sea. However, this subjective mood changes when he looks at sea in relation to land, stating that “a mixture of land and sea is magnificent – a continuous, surprising source of beauty.” Soon he is writing in superlatives, admiring how this mixture is the essential element of beauty ascribed to Catalonia’s seaside towns and most particularly Barcelona itself, where it is “one of the most beautiful things about the city.” I put down his book to look again at the sea, that primary fact of existence, never primarily an aesthetic proposition. What is the right word for sea, if you can only have one word? Below that grey wintry plane that has no straight borders, that can be all horizon and no straight lines, entire worlds exist we can hardly imagine, unaware of our right word, our changing opinions.

Prahran

 

Arriving to be handed a pint glass of intoxicants, the air a dream of verbosity and marijuana trumpets, a friend of a friend’s party continuing into the night a dishevelled conference with friends of friends, the exact purpose of the party less clear at departure than arrival, is Prahran. Dropping off the proofs earlyish of the exacting school magazine to the printer in a forgotten side street, sometime in youth, wayward artwork and limpid photography and enthusiastic compositions, frost hard on bluestone, is Prahran. Flipping screaming alternative and freewheeling jazz and big-city rhythm and blues albums in aisles of A-Z bins off the autumn street beneath crisp fluorescents, a strange Detroit classic roiling from the duct-tape speakers, to find a pressing not until then thought a pressing interest, is Prahran. Is it a suburb, or a state of mind, Prahran? I’ve often wondered. Fronting the counter of the all-hours cellar, its liquid assets in shining glass from floor to ceiling, there to support the manifold thirsts of those around the corner, red-nosed reined-in dear-at-that-price tipplers, liquor-is-quicker clientele, six-packs for any occasion, a dipsomania big as Tasmania, day and night peering through a glass darkly, or sparkly, is Prahran. Watching, from shifty makeshift scaffold seating, actors turn themselves inside out waiting for Godot, or simply waiting for the reviews, a legally binding tree standing mute witness to their comings and not goings, a simile, or facsimile of backyard existence, its curt rejoinders and febrile academicism, in Prahran. Sitting in the sixties going somewhere, only where, when it’s ninety Fahrenheit behind meticulously designed wooden slat blinds of a green rattler, hot wind exorbitant, as jaywalkers weave front and back of the tram halted by jams of Valiants and Holdens, too hot to read, just breathe, is Prahran. That much is clear but doesn’t answer the question, is this a suburb, or a state of mind? Sipping the first coffee at a busy window and waiting for the toastie, remembering the American bookstore and whatever happened to the American bookstore, and why are the rare books dealers relocating to industrial parks, as the toastie arrives, and where would an author begin writing their great Australian novel with the creative rule, write only about Prahran. Observing from a safe distance Jaded Bayside Commuters (JBC) beelining off the beeping doors towards the immovable rail gates past the old heritage ballroom and the defunct Continental, destination a night home in cottage or unit, their eyes preoccupied with being occupied, their demeanour meaning business, no time to stop and talk, sidestepping the issue, if there is an issue, is Prahran.