20 October, 2021

Day 20 of Writing Nangak Tamboree.

I may have been slightly hysterical yesterday. I do need to slow down. But I feel calmer today after a long, slow walk beside the Darebin Creek, back and forth along the stretch between Plenty and Southern Roads, on the muddy, grassy right bank. Or is it the left? The north-easterly-ish bank.

It’s early morning but the sun is warm already and the sky a blistering blue. Summer is coming.

The creek is still running high from all the rain. It’s not, you’d have to say, a creek famous for white water. Nobody, I’m sure, is going adventure rafting along here. But with high water like this, you do get a few little rapids.

Trying to record sound, I keep having to dodge perpetrators of my new pet hate – people who talk very loudly on speaker phone while walking their dogs out in the middle of nowhere.

Now I’m at my ‘standing desk’, which is, to all other eyes, an unattractive concrete storm water system something-or-other. I’m sure there’s an engineering term for it, but it looks like a miniature Martello tower, just below the Nangak Tamboree revegetation area.

I’m doing the Bird Count in a more relaxed fashion today, after yesterday’s frenzy – glance up, anything there? hear a call, focus binoculars. A Willie Wagtail chirrups from the wire fence, and when I move on it keeps me company, reminding me of the robin in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. It’s the little birds that elude me but also delight. On my way here, a New Holland Honeyeater almost flew right into me, swerving at the last moment, and a flock of fairy wrens always makes my day.

There’s something flitting about in a Cootamundra wattle on the riverbank, but I can’t for the life of me catch a glimpse. A raven sitting in an old acacia hunches its shoulders at every croak, like some minor Dickens character.

I walk on towards Plenty Road. This is a lovely stretch. The escarpment rises up on one side, just under where they’re moving Frog Hollow. I can hear the heavy equipment in action today – I don’t want to go look because I fear for the swathe of grassland and eucalypts in between the former golf range and the hillock of old fill.

Apparently one day there’ll be a bike path through here too, which my bike-riding self approves, but my walking self wishes it could stay like this always. It’s hard to believe I’m in the middle of an enormous sprawling city, next to a major road and a university campus.