Peace

Free choice

Peace

Free choice.

I wake up this morning at Policeman’s Point, on the east coast of Tasmania. The sun is beaming into Troopie, the wind has dropped, the sea is sparkling.

I’ve just spent the weekend with old friends from the Tasman Peninsula, friends spanning back forty years. It is so comfortable, so supportive, so much fun. I haven’t laughed so much since last year’s weekend away. The venue could be irrelevant, but each year we go to a beach or bush location to walk, talk, and celebrate a friend’s birthday. This year, ‘Picaninny’, a commune set-up from the 70s, acres of native gardens peppered with home-built wooden cottages of interesting designs, adorned with ‘cool’ art, sun-catchers, and wall hangings of twine, driftwood, shells, bones and sea-weed. Birds – wrens, honey-eaters and swallows abound, darting amongst the flowering melaleucas, callistemons and leptospermums. A place to breathe deeply, reflect, reminisce!

The weekend ends. I can’t go back home… yet. I drive on further up the coast, always looking for a camp-site less-peopled, and find myself at Policeman’s Point. Here, I am right beside Anson’s Bay, which I plunge into each morning. Refreshing revitalisation! I roam the edge of the bay and the endless white ocean beaches bird-spotting, and honing my photography skills. I ‘capture’ red necked stints, pacific gulls, oyster catchers, hooded plovers, pelicans. A lesson in patience. Birds rarely stay still by the sea. They revel in the wind and the waves.

I read. The joy of reading a whole book in a day with no interruptions, without having to do anything else, is a treat indeed. And the book is called ‘Gravity Let me Go’. Prophetic!

I am called further north to my camp at Stumpys in the Mt William National Park. I’ve been visiting this spot for forty years, first in my two-man tent and now in Troopie. In fact, I have ‘my’ camp spot reserved in my head, sheltered by the lagoon, but close to the wild coast. It can be very wild at Stumpys, so much so that the swans have learnt to surf on the waves.

Oh no. Someone is in my favourite spot. I park nearby, still by the lagoon, where the wind rustles over the usually calm waters. Out on the beach it is mayhem, with waves crashing, and the sand being whipped up to ‘painful exfoliant’ level. The next day the interlopers leave, and I can return to my spot. I am at peace. Some things never change.

But I sure noticed change as I drove in. This National Park is home to the Forester Kangaroos/Eastern Greys. I usually see dozens grazing on the grassy plains. Not so this year. The Kunzea ambigua , a native plant to the area, has taken over. It is beautiful with its masses of yellow blooms. The all-pervading fragrance it omits is heady to the senses. It creates a magnificent landscape but the balance has changed and the Forester grazing lands have disappeared.

Next day while hiking down the coast I come across a party of young bushwalkers with their aboriginal guide. They are on the Wukalina Cultural Walk. I wander along with the guide and discuss the changes in the area’s vegetation. She suggests that since cultural slow burns, to keep grazing lands intact, have finished, it has enabled the Kunzea to spread. She leads me to an area of huge aboriginal midden mounds by a creek. I have never seen such massive feasting sites. Usually they have been worn down by wind and waves and human interference. Luckily there is a fire trail nearby that heads back to camp, circumventing the beach walk into the wind and the inevitable sand-papering.

The next day the wind abates. I go for a walk to Mt William with its vista of the north-east of Tas. and offshore islands.

Then time to amble, to swim, to read and relax. Not bound by appointments, commitments, must do lists, weeds in the garden, shopping. Ten days of no phone or internet too. Just peace with free choice.

Now I have come home to the restrictions of daily life, I long for the calm of the bush, the beach, the sea with its different moods, the sky with its endless stars, and even the wind.

Sometimes in the fight to save the things that matter – the forests, the unpolluted seas, and against the crippling debt of the stadium in Hobart, you don’t have time to stop to enjoy the things that matter. Sometimes, you just need to step out of daily life, with its constant demands and distractions, to appreciate what’s really important to you … and to find peace.