Author: Scholar Gipsy

A Day Out in the People’s Park

A Day Out in the People’s Park

The rugged coastline of Sydney’s Royal National Park.

Early in 1879, the New South Wales Legislative Assembly passed a resolution stating that ‘the health of the people should be the primary consideration of all good Governments, and, to ensure the sound health and vigour of the community … all cities towns and villages should be possessed of parks and pleasure grounds as places of recreation.’ The resolution led directly to the establishment of Australia’s first, and the world’s second, national park. For  140 years the large tract of open land on the southern outskirts of Sydney originally known simply as ‘The National Park’ and later renamed ‘Royal National Park’ has been a place of retreat and recreation for the inhabitants of Australia’s biggest city.

Now, when ‘the sound health and vigour of the community’ needs to be supported as much as possible, how grateful we can be for our national parks! For reasons of mental as much as physical health, they’ve provided a lifeline for pent-up bodies and spirits itching to escape the confines of ‘lockdown’.

Enjoying a day away from the city, without really leaving the city. Photo: Sara Freeland.

Yesterday five members of my extended family met up with Sara Freeland of The Freeland Hiking Company for a private day hike in the Royal National Park. What we were after: fresh air, exercise, far-reaching views and a chance to connect with an iconic Sydney landscape. What we got: all that plus great company, delicious food, wildlife encounters and some intriguing insights into the history and ecology of the Park.

Our walking route comprised the middle section of the 26km Coast Track, which runs down the eastern edge of the Park from Bundeena in the north to Otford in the south. We drove to Wattamolla Beach, left our cars in the car park there,  then walked the approximately 7km to Garie Beach and back again. At a leisurely pace, with plenty of time for photography and stops for morning tea and lunch, the entire walk lasted just under 8 hours.

Morning tea was served on this elevated rock platform known as ‘The Balcony’.

The geology of this area is so rugged and the flora so distinctively Australian that it’s hard to believe that the original plans for the Park included English-style ‘ornamental plantations, lawns and gardens’, racecourses and a zoo! Our guide, Sara, explained how public and government thinking about what a National Park should be changed radically over the first hundred years, tending more and more towards conservation. By the 1970s Park philosophy had swung so far in this direction that there little place for human visitors at all; today there is more of a balance between recreational and environmental demands, while the human heritage of the Park is also acknowledged along with its natural features. 

A Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoo munching on casuarina seeds.

With a keen birdwatcher in our group, we were on the lookout from the beginning for bird life along the walking route. The first we saw were large groups of noisy Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos feeding on the seeds of banksia and casuarina trees. Later in the day, as the terrain changed to coastal heathland, we saw dozens of New Holland Honeyeaters, tiny balls of concentrated energy flitting through and just above the low scrub. Pretty little Welcome Swallows appeared later along the route, and we were also lucky enough to see a White-bellied Sea Eagle soaring overhead.

New Holland Honeyeater. Photo: Peter Lewis.

We weren’t expecting to see native animals along this well used walking route, but one member of the group cannily followed (with her eyes) a rustling sound in the undergrowth beside the track and discovered an echidna hiding amongst the ferns. I know we are not meant to favour the ‘cute and cuddly’ kinds of wildlife, but my goodness this little fellow had an adorable face, peering up at us with an expression part inquisitive, part mystified. 

This shy but also slightly curious echidna was spotted beside the track. Photo: Peter Lewis.

Finally, as the afternoon wore on we saw unmistakable signs of whale activity a short distance off-shore, which Sara identified as humpbacks migrating from Antartica to give birth in warmer waters. So all in all it was a good day on the wildlife front!

Afternoon whale watching.

Something I appreciate about walking with a guide is the enlightenment they can provide about the plants you see along the way. We can all recognize an echidna, but who’s going to know the name of that nice purple flower, or what that weird-looking tree is? That’s when a knowledgeable guide becomes invaluable. Sara’s commentary made us realize that almost everything in the landscape has a story, from the bright orange fungus that helps carry information and nutrients through the ‘wood wide web’ to the burnt tree trunks bedecked with bright green foliage, examples of ‘epicormic growth’ in the wake of a bushfire. 

A grass tree – one of the strange plants we needed our guide to identify.

All this botanizing seems a long way from the early plans (never carried out) to build cricket pitches and rifle ranges on this land, but in fact the Trustees’ original vision for a People’s Park remains; it’s just expressed differently. We saw lots of other walkers and runners who had come out here alone, in pairs or in groups to enjoy the scenery, the sense of height and space (much of the track runs along a cliff top), and the ability to move freely on foot over long distances.

National Parks make access to the magnificence of nature a democratic right. Over lunch – a sumptuous array of platters with fruit and cheese and bread and meats, which Sara had somehow produced from her backpack – we rested our legs and took in the view over Garie Beach, feeling much like the royalty for whom the Park is named. ‘I wouldn’t want to be anyone but us right now,’ my niece declared, and I think we all felt exactly the same way. 

Our lunch view overlooking Garie Beach.

[We did the Freeland Hiking Company’s Sydney Coastal Trek, but it’s also worth checking out the much cheaper Royal Hiking Adventure, which is specifically geared towards Sydney locals.]

Seeing the Dalmatian Coast

Seeing the Dalmatian Coast

The marina at Agana, the starting point for our planned sailing holiday (Image: Sunsail).

In May, I was meant to go to Croatia. I was invited to join a group exploring Croatia’s Adriatic coast and islands on a skippered catamaran. Starting and finishing in Agana, just south of the city of Split, we would spend a week sailing from one secluded beach or historic town to another, stopping to swim, savour the local food and wines, and steep ourselves in an ancient culture.

Then coronavirus happened, international travel restrictions were imposed, and that was that. The trip was off. 

To soften the blow – and whet our appetites for, hopefully, another opportunity next year – the company organizing the trip, Sunsail and The Moorings, organized a virtual tour of the area we’d planned to visit. One Friday evening, in the depths of lockdown, I joined a zoom meeting with my fellow travellers and some of the staff from the Agana sailing base. Sipping a dry white wine spritzed with soda water and munching pieces of grilled eggplant topped with feta – my attempts to recreate at home the atmosphere of a Croatian seaside bar – I watched glorious drone images of the coastline and the various islands we might have visited. 

Sailing to the island of Vis (Image: Sunsail).

Meanwhile, base leader Antonio, speaking from Agana, provided a commentary on the best places to swim, dive, kayak, hike, eat out, taste wines and visit heritage sites. We learned that much of the film Mamma Mia 2, supposedly set on a Greek island, was actually shot on location on the island of Vis, one of the stops on our itinerary. I scribbled notes about the beauty of tiny St Clement island, which has the most sunny days per year of any place in Croatia, and about the stunning national park on the island of Mljet.

Mljet National Park (Image copyright Np-mljet.hr).

Thanks to Antonio and his team, I now know exactly what I would like to see if I do get to Croatia next year, or the year after, or whenever it might be. In the mean time, how can an armchair traveller ‘see’ more of this beautiful region? I decided to create my own virtual tour, through works of art that depict this coastline.

First, a short digression on names is needed. We know this country as Croatia, but thirty years ago, it was part of Yugoslavia. In the nineteenth century, the coastal part of modern Croatia was called Dalmatia, and in ancient times the whole area was known as Illyria. Confusing? Yes, but it’s also kind of nice that there are so many names to choose from in talking about this part of the world. I’ve chosen ‘Dalmatia’ for the title of this blog post, because that’s the name used by most of the artists I mention.  

The first image on my virtual art tour of the Dalmatian Coast is a watercolour by the English artist Edward Lear (1812-1888). The painting is titled ‘View near Spolatra’, which is an older name for the modern-day city of Split. It was painted in 1856, when Lear was spending a lot of time in this part of Europe. 

Edward Lear, ‘View Near Spolatra’, 1856.

You probably know Lear as a writer of ‘nonsense’ poems like ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’, but he was also a very accomplished landscape artist. What amazes me about this painting is the blue. It’s so vivid and it suffuses the whole scene, not just the sea. It’s as if the colour of the water is so intense that it has seeped into the boat, its shadow, the hillside and the town. Lear has painted a blue world. 

It’s also worth noting how much empty space there is in the picture. There are no crowds here, no holidaymakers; in fact, there are no people at all. We can infer that someone must live in the buildings in the middle distance, and someone must own the cattle in the foreground, and someone must be sailing those sailboats on the water, but we can’t see any of them. Nature dominates, and in comparison humans are very insignificant.

Emil Schindler, ‘On the Dalmatian Coast near Ragusa’ , 1888; Kunsthistorischesmuseum, Vienna.

The second picture on my tour is by the Austrian painter Emil Jacob Schindler (1842-1892). It’s called ‘On the Dalmatian Coast near Ragusa’ – Ragusa being an old name for the city we know as Dubrovnik – and it was painted in 1888. Dubrovnik is a bit further south than my Croatian cruise would have gone, but it is part of the same coastline.  

I’m drawn to the light in Schindler’s painting. The sunlight seems to glow on those trees and stones, creating a warmth you don’t see in Lear’s picture. Schindler’s painting also depicts a much more civilized, almost classical scene, which includes gardens and sculptures, unlike Lear’s wild coastline.

The third painting I’ve chosen is by the American artist Martha Walter (1875-1976), and it’s called ‘Market Place, Dalmatian Coast’. I haven’t been able to discover exactly when it was painted, but I think it was probably in the 1930s, when Walter travelled extensively in Europe and North Africa.

Martha Walter, ‘Market Place, Dalmatian Coast’, c.1930s.

Martha Walter trained in the Impressionist style of painting, and that shows here. I like her brushstrokes and the way she suggests forms with patches of colour. I also love the fact that this is a painting full of women, which is something you hardly ever see in Western art (at least not women with their clothes on!). 

Walter has painted women working, and while the same warm light we saw in Schindler’s painting illuminates them, it doesn’t turn them into anything classical or ideal. Meanwhile, Lear’s bright blue sea has become the background to their daily lives, rather than being the star of the painting. I feel that in this picture the artist has taken the trouble to really look at the people who call this landscape home. 

Hrvoje Kapelina, Korčula.

Last stop on my art tour is a lovely painting of the harbour at Korčula by local artist Hrvoje Kapelina. There’s that blue again, brighter than ever, but this time in a kind of dance with the other two primary colours. Look at those wonderful reflections! I hadn’t heard of Kapelina before I researched this piece, but I will be sure to visit his gallery in Korčula when I do finally make it to Croatia.

I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing the Dalmatian Coast with me through the eyes of these four artists. Maybe it will inspire you to create your own virtual tour of a place you haven’t yet been able to visit in person – and perhaps it will also inspire you to visit this coastline in reality one day.

For information about skippered, bareboat and flotilla sailing holidays in Croatia, visit Sunsail or The Moorings.

Kayaking to shore from a Moorings catamaran at Vis island, Croatia; photo credit Rama Knight.
Lockdown

Lockdown

When coronavirus restrictions were imposed six weeks ago and we began adjusting to life under lockdown, a memory started to tug at my mind. It was the memory of reading about another kind of lockdown, in a children’s story by Laura Ingalls Wilder called The Long Winter.

As a child growing up in Australia, I loved Wilder’s ‘Little House’ books, which are set in various locations on the American frontier during the late nineteenth century. I loved them passionately, in the way that children adore their very favourite books. I was the proud owner of a boxed set of the paperbacks issued by Puffin Books, and I read them all multiple times, from the first in the set, Little House in the Big Woods, to the final one, Little Town on the Prairie.

Wilder’s stories were first published in the 1930s and 40s, but recounted experiences from the author’s childhood in a pioneer family in America in the 1870s and 80s. I read them in the early 1970s. Now here we are in 2020 and I find myself pulling the little boxed set from the bookshelf and carefully – because the old paperbacks have stuck together with time – extracting a book I haven’t looked at for nearly fifty years.

Portrait of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Public Domain)

The Long Winter must have made a great impression on me, because I found myself thinking of it almost as we started to find the shape of our days under the new COVID-19 restrictions. No travel. No leaving the house except for essential purposes. No meetings with anyone outside the household. The restlessness of being cooped up. Tensions flaring within the family. A growing sense of isolation from the rest of society. I’d encountered it all before, in Wilder’s book.

The lockdown described in The Long Winter was not a response to disease, but the result of extreme weather conditions. It wasn’t mandated by law, but necessitated by physical survival. During an especially harsh winter that lasted nearly seven months, Laura and her family were confined to their prairie home in the Dakota Territory by an almost unbroken series of violent blizzards. The Long Winter tells how they survived.

One of Garth Williams’ charming illustrations to The Long Winter shows the family huddled around the stove.

At a practical level, the challenges the Ingalls family faced were beyond anything we pampered moderns can imagine. The struggle to stay warm and fed – or, at least, reasonably warm and somewhat fed – became a fulltime job involving the whole family. When their coal ran out, they had to twist strands of hay into sticks to feed the stove, and when their flour ran out, they had to mill wheat in a coffee grinder so that bread could be baked. Eventually, both the hay-twisting and the wheat-grinding became tasks that consumed the whole day, with mother, father and the three older daughters taking turns at each in rotation. Oh, and some basic home-schooling had to be fitted in there too.

Of course, there are lessons for us in this – about patience, and endurance, and doing what needs to be done. But the chasm in material conditions between the Ingalls’ lockdown and our own is too great for us to be able to identify with their ordeal in any practical sense. It’s at a psychological level that the story rings true to our experiences. 

Another Garth Williams illustration depicts Pa teaching Laura how to twist hay into sticks of fuel.

As Wilder’s story shows, without school and work and shopping and visitors, all the incidental movement and social contacts of normal life drop away, and there’s little left to make one day different from another. Get up, feed the fire, do the housework, prepare and eat meals, try to keep entertained with music and stories – the family is locked in a minimal and seemingly endless routine. ‘Laura felt that it was the same day over again’, and again ‘Another day was the same.’ 

The monotony is compounded by there being no end in sight. Blizzard follows blizzard. Things get worse before they get better. The horizon of hope recedes. Rumours that spring is coming, that the train bringing supplies to the town can finally get through the snow-filled passes, prove false. ‘Laura seemed to have forgotten summer; she could not believe it would ever come again.’

Train stuck in snow 1881, photograph by Elmer and Tenney, Minnesota Historical Society (Wikimedia Commons). The man standing on top of the train provides a sense of scale.

As the unprecedented becomes the new normal, old ways of life – going to school, visiting with friends – start to feel unreal. There seems something uncanny about those days, just before the shutdown, when nobody knew what was coming and all went unthinkingly about their ordinary lives. Those times of freedom and movement and connection seem ‘very far away and long ago’, as the circle of interest and activity shrinks, finally, to the single room they can heat.

There’s a lot in The Long Winter about discouragement in such circumstances and the need to fight against it, every day. One way that Laura and siblings are able to escape from their confined existence is through literature that transports them imaginatively to other places. At one point, in a chapter titled ‘Cold and Dark’, Laura and her younger sister Carrie recite Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem ‘The Swan’s Nest’, which creates a mental image of a beautiful riverside scene completely different from the actual physical environment of their house. ‘The air was warm and quiet there, the grass was warm in the sunshine, the clear water sang its song to itself, and the leaves softly murmured. The meadow’s insects drowsily hummed. While they were there with little Ellie, Laura and Carrie almost forgot the cold.’

My full collection of Wilder books, nine in all. Laura and Carrie used books to escape mentally from the misery of the prairie winter, whereas I grew up in sunny Australia reading about the marvels of blizzards!

As we make our way through this lockdown, there are plenty of ways for us to find a similar sense of being elsewhere, in imagination. Armchair travel, whether through fiction, non-fiction, books or film, is a powerful tool for fighting boredom and discouragement. And when we do return to travelling in the real world, I think we’re going to appreciate every single journey, however small or humble. Any change of scene will feel good; just to be in motion will be a blessing. In The Long Winter, when the cold weather finally ends, Laura makes a tiny journey, as far as the front room – the one they couldn’t use all winter because they weren’t able to heat it:

‘The May morning was warm and the wind from the prairie smelled of springtime. Doors were open and both rooms could be used once more. Going in and out of the large front room whenever she wanted to gave Laura a spacious and rested feeling, as if she could never be cross again.’

In spring and summer the prairie returns to life. Here’s a prairie dog enjoying the sunshine in South Dakota. (Image: Alice Petch)
Into the Forest

Into the Forest

Forest near Vancouver, Canada

One of my Christmas presents last year was the book Gossip from the Forest by the Scottish writer Sara Maitland. The book, published in 2012, is billed as an inquiry into ‘the tangled roots of our forests and fairytales’. Like much of Maitland’s work, it’s a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, which interleaves personal accounts of her visits to twelve British forests with retellings of twelve traditional European fairytales. 

I might write a post on fairy tales and travel another time, but this post will be about forests and travel. Twelve times in the course of a year, Sara Maitland set out on a journey, the exclusive aim of which was to visit a forest. It struck me, reading about these visits, how rarely I’ve done that. A forest hasn’t often been the object of my quest when I’ve gone travelling. Excursions into forests and woodlands have tended to be bonuses or side-trips, optional extras or icing on the cake, rather than the main event. This is not from any lack of interest in trees on my part: my father was an arborophile and enthusiastic tree-planter, so I grew up knowing the names of many different tree species and how to recognise them. But as I’ve travelled over the years, the idea of visiting a forest somehow hasn’t come up as often as the idea of visiting other kinds of landscape. Now why is that?

It can be hard to pick out the details within the immersive environment of the forest.

One rather sad reason, I think, is that forests are hard to photograph, and if there’s one thing we like to do on our travels, it’s to record the experience with our cameras (or phones). We tend to look at mountains and coastlines from below, above or afar, from some vantage point that makes it easier to compose an image inside a rectangular frame. But forests enfold us, and the multiplicity of trees confuses the eye. Attempts to photograph forests from the inside often come out looking messy, without a clear focal point. 

This photo taken by my friend Paul Chatterton in the Vienna Woods avoids the visual confusion of some forest photographs. It resembles a wonderful series of forest paintings by the artist Gustav Klimt

Luckily, the Japanese concept of shinrin-yoku – ‘forest-bathing’ – provides a whole other way of thinking about why we might like to spend time in forests: not to capture an image like a trophy, but to surrender ourselves to a multisensory experience. Forests nourish our senses of touch, smell and hearing. They offer plenty of visual interest too, but with an emphasis on close-ups rather than panoramas.

Pine seedling in forest near the Athabascar Falls, Alberta, Canada

Inspired by Sara Maitland’s book, I now have a list of British forests I want to visit. At the top is the evocatively named ‘Staverton Thicks’ (only in England!), an oak forest in Suffolk. Maitland describes this ‘smallish piece of ancient deciduous woodland’ as an imaginative portal to ‘the forests of childhood, the forests of dreams’, where all kinds of magic seem possible. Who could resist that? But I may have to wait a while to fulfil this fantasy, given the current restrictions on international travel.

Another gorgeous picture of the Vienna Woods, thanks to my friend Paul Chatterton.

Luckily I had the chance to visit some truly magnificent wooded landscapes here in Australia, just before the borders between our states closed. These were the forests in the Great Otway National Park in Victoria, which lie a short distance inland from the renowned Great Ocean Road. (Everything seems to be ‘great’ down in Victoria!) If you find yourself planning a visit to that part of Australia I strongly recommend that you allow time to drive (or even better, walk) through the forested parts of the Park as well as along the more famous coastline. In my opinion these parts are just as beautiful and awe-inspiring, and you’ll be sharing them with far fewer tourists. 

I saw two types of woodland in the Great Otway National Park. The first was a relatively dry kind of forest consisting of mountain ash and eucalypts, many of them incredibly tall.  The best way to get a sense of the height of these trees is to visit Otway Fly Treetop Adventures, where there’s a zipline (not, I think, a good way to experience the solemnity of the forest) and, at much lower cost, an elevated walkway that takes you high into the treetops, offering the chance to enter a secret world of arboreal skyscrapers.

Forest and waterfall in the Great Otway National Park.

The second kind of woodland is temperate rainforest, ancient and lush. This is a landscape you descend into to discover quiet streams, splendid waterfalls and fern gullies that seem to have survived from a prehistoric world. Water trickles over stones and fallen trees melt back into the undergrowth, draped in vivid green moss. The colour of that moss, when it absorbs sunshine that has pierced the tree canopy high above, reminded me of Robert Frost’s enigmatic line ‘Nature’s first green is gold’, from the poem ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’.  That green-gold may be, as Frost says, nature’s ‘hardest hue to hold’, and it’s certainly hard for a camera lens to hold. But it’s easy for memory to hang on to and treasure.

Rainforest floor, Great Otway National Park

These forest-bathing experiences in southwestern Victoria have made me hungry for more forests to visit. What’s the most beautiful forest you know of? It might be a local woodland where you’ve walked many times, or a forest you travelled far to see: either way, I’d love to have your suggestions so I can add them to my list of dream forests to visit one day. 

Did you know?

It’s OK to use the words ‘forest’ and ‘woodland’ interchangeably, but there is a subtle difference between the two. The Oxford English Dictionary defines woodland as ‘land covered with trees’ and forest as ‘an extensive tract of land covered with trees and undergrowth’. Do you see the difference? It’s in that word ‘extensive’. So, the UK’s Woodland Trust explains, areas designated as forests tend to be larger than those designated as woods. The Australian Government’s Department of the Environment uses not only the size of the area covered but also the density of trees to decide whether a place is a forest or a woodland. Simply, woodlands have ‘fewer and more scattered trees than forests’. If you want to be really precise, woodlands ‘contain widely spaced trees, the crowns of which do not touch’. So now you know!