Being There ...

Across the rippled cove there are dark shadows between the gums that push profusely to the water’s edge. The bush thickens over there and the trunks gleam whitely in this slowly setting sun.

I’m having a moment. A flash of revelation that will change the way I feel in this country.

Looking. Admiring. Lost in the beauty of this place, sitting quietly in the cooling sand. I wouldn’t claim to feel a presence, but there’s something there, some glimmer of a subtle sense for me as I stare across the water and into the spaces between the trees.

I’m watching. Looking on. Looking in.

And that’s the thing.

I can never simply be a part of this. It’s a thought that sucks a little of the life out of me: that once people lived in this place who were fully here, who saw themselves as integral, without distinction from all the life and soil and rock, water and space that surrounded them. The old people were this place, and this place was them. Think of that. I try. I fail.

This pulls the rug from under me a little, a quick realisation that I will always only be a stranger here, someone passing through. Passing through with lightness and respect I hope, but never forming a part of this greater presence.

What must that be like? How must it be to see no distinction between the ‘natural’ and the ‘human’ worlds. How must it be to feel intimately connected to place?

I can’t grab it. It’s not in the centuries of separation bred into me, bred into any settler in this place. That has to be true, surely, that we are not culturally wired to be of the world. We are in the world. We watch it. We pass through some otherness, with licence through this distance to use the world and its abundance. Ultimately to destroy it if needs must. That’s our cultural history as part of the white north.

That was a moment. The place was Refuge Cove at Wilson’s Promontory, a living postcard. I’ve walked a lot since, lowering myself as best I can into the wilder places that I can find, smelling their scents, feeling the air, drinking vistas, listening hard to the creatures around me, sweating at hills, curling up on the hard ground, but never being a part of it. Never being wholly here. Is that the European instinct? To live in our heads rather than in a more entangled sense of person integrated with place?

These are the questions I wonder at as I gaze out on country. And I struggle to get a sense of it, to feel the merest inkling of belonging, the feeling the old people here must simply have known more than sensed. That they were here, and here was them, an indivisibility that the essence of caring. I will always just be me, looking on. Being here, but not being here.

I’m awed by the power of that other belonging, of the care it represents, of its mystery and unknowability.