a symmetry so exact

Today, I found myself visiting a small country town westwards from Melbourne to visit an old bushwalking friend who is ailing. I came across this aspect (in the photo) on the outskirts of the town as I completed a short walk to collect my thoughts before the bus and train trip back home. The aspect seemed to capture the sundry moods of the day.

My adored friend, who I have known for near on thirty years, is a key inspiration in my understanding of the Australian soil, its fauna and flora; though never to the volume that she comprehends. Her long, tenacious battle with an insipid, slow choking illness, is near exhausted and in I suspect by this visit it will become a quiet farewell to this disciple of the Australian rural ethos.

On the many walks we undertook across the years, it was her knowledge that she granted me to plunder until I was full of astonishment. Often brief words would pass on these walks - there was no need to talk, just to witness, hear and sense. Too, many times, in my angers and solemns, hers was a refuge where I could degenerate my baggage. There is her uncanny knack for sensing the emotion of the landscape too and she is ruled by the mood of the seasons, the latter remark I am certain she would realise is not a rebuke but an admiration. I should think this moodiness of season has been instilled also in me, albeit much less, to which I am grateful. Though, of winter, I am yet convinced of its worth! Spring on the other hand? Well it is an acoustic of Nature!

We share a great love of Poetry, especially Australian Poets and their words, though our writ is universal and not confined to English. Indeed, when we meet, we always enjoy a Poetry reading - the challenge being to remember and recite aloud a chosen poem. This is done not for a critical audience - there is just the two of us - but for the simple pleasure of hearing language, realising inflection and stress, moving with the Poet's rhythm.

For this visit I chose a poem by Henry Lawson (1867-1922) one of the finest of the Australian Bush Poets of the late 19th and early 20th Century from an Australian landscape that is, sadly, passing:

Eurunderee

There are scenes in the distance where beauty is not,
On the desolate flats where gaunt apple trees rot.
Where the brooding old ridge rises up to the breeze
From his dark lonely gullies of stringy-bark trees,
There are voice-haunted gaps, ever sullen and strange,
But Eurunderee lies like a gem in the range.

Still I see in my fancy the dark-green and blue
Of the box-covered hills where the five-corners grew;
And the rugged old sheoaks that sighed in the bend
O'er the lily-decked pools where the dark ridges end,
And the scrub-covered spurs running down from the Peak
To the deep grassy banks of Eurunderee Creek.

On the knolls where the vineyards and fruit-gardens are
There's a beauty that even the Drought cannot mar;
For I noticed it oft, in the days that are lost,
As I trod on the siding where lingered the frost,
When the shadows of night from the gullies were gone
And the hills in the background were flushed by the dawn.

I was there in late years, but there's many a change
Where the Cudgegong River flows down through the range,
For the curse of the town with the railroad had come,
And the goldfields were dead. And the girl and the chum
And the old home were gone, yet the oaks seemed to speak
Of the hazy old days on Eurunderee Creek.

And I stood by that creek, ere the sunset grew cold,
When the leaves of the sheoaks are traced on the gold,
And I thought of old things, and I thought of old folks,
Till I sighed in my heart to the sigh of the oaks;
For the years waste away like the waters that leak
Through the pebbles and sand of Eurunderee Creek.

I am certain I did not recite the poem word perfect, (the memory shudders somewhat nowadays) though it is faithfully reproduced here. Her poem cited for me was the terse, yet poignant lines from the Australian, Antigone Kefala (1935 - ) in her poem, 'The Wanderer':

The river
moved further away
in the heat of the road
shimmers of water
towards the horizon.

The salt
which they gave him at home
he would place on his tongue
to taste his own roots
and draw comfort.

The world
made of a matter that never
forgets, a symmetry so exact,
fatality at the heart
of each thing.

Of course, her selection was infinitely wiser, sending a message I understood and I suspect much easier to recite! The last stanza, especially, is etched upon me.

As we long embraced on the outstep at her unobtrusive home set amongst clematis, sassafras, wattle and bottlebrush - most in bloom or upon the bud - with a timid day's Sun weakly illuminating the cloud stricken afternoon, she quietly stated, "Terry, always feel the landscape, capture your heartbeat of its mood, never stop learning. Be devoted to your soil." A chill shuddered through my body as the words burned my passion. I feel it is unlikely I shall see her again, though in a way this seems altogether proper and because of this essence there is no melancholy.

Her sanctuary is a long way from my home but not the least from my heart.