Birds – Chris Collins

Cairns Capers II – River Rollicks

With a special shout out to the beautiful big dog that lived in our dear little hotel, Le Cher Du Monde, in Port Douglas and some more northern madness on the heaving 4-mile beach that had a big a-frame board saying, ‘beach closed, croc sighted (water temperature 28 degrees)’, we were off next to Mossman Gorge. It was delightful, gorgy – ya know. No crocs up there which was a bonus, but that’s because it’s cold, so that’s shit. The trees have enormous, buttressed roots in the rainforest with vines in ornate patterns, and we found a lovely green pool off the main, rushing, dangerous river and got in that to cool our feet off. Then off to Daintree Village where we spent a joyful afternoon walking in slow motion down a country lane clutching a flier about local birds following the call of an oriole and a wompoo fruit-dove. When you see me, ask me to do my impression. You’d never believe a bird could make that sound. We also scored dinner in a ridiculously fancy restaurant – the sort that over adjectivizes its dishes but under fills them – because it was the only one open in a 10km radius.

Early the next morning we were stood on a wooden jetty by the river. Under the moist, grey sky, the air was gentle and warm; mist capered charmingly against the hills where flags of white cockatoos waved, and the green river mingled with the green banks and trees. I was positively trembling with excitement.

Here at last was our dawn cruise on the Daintree River Experience, run by the charming and expert Murray. I had been looking forward to this so much, for a year, in fact – when the world went silly and borders shut last July, we exchanged the Daintree and Barrier Reef for the empty lakebed of Mungo bundled up in hats and scarves, and I sat by my campfire muttering that I should have been on a sodding boat cruise looking at sodding birds on the sodding Daintree. The exalted moment had come, and, like the Kuku Yalanji Cultural Habitat Tour, it was The Best Thing I’ve Ever Done. Can you iMAGine my excitement when he handed me a little clipboard and pencil to tick off bird species – I nearly lost my goddamn mind.

Murray is a prince of the river. He steers his boat masterfully and cuts the engine just as the turn is made so the momentum takes you soundlessly within an inch of the eyes of birds. Over two hours we saw kingfishers, flycatchers, a great-billed heron, frogmouths, a green tree snake (that is not green and has a yellow belly, but, in a break from common Australian nominations, is surprisingly not called the yellow-bellied tree snake), a baby crocodile, a … very much granddaddy crocodile, and, very memorably, a black butcherbird capturing a white-lipped tree frog. This was rather brutal, so we gently steered away from Barratt Creek and nature’s rough cruelty and instead stopped round a bend to admire the mists smeared over the mountains. Here – best of all – we were told unequivocally to shut the hell up and quietly take it in.

Time drew on, however, and those who know me well and have endured me on motorways and federal highways know that morning is my peak, ahem, evacuation time. And there comes the moment when I am so desperate that I stop having fun and my silent need is so loud it’s fog-horning in the driver’s ear.

Needing to wee when you’re in the middle of a seriously croc infested river is no laughing matter.

We disembarked in a cloud of flitting welcome swallows that landed on the very boat where we sat, and bent double, I renewed my intense gratitude, regretfully returned the clipboard and hobbled off, half hysterical, to a convenience. Then back at our little bed and breakfast our charming landlady cooked us breakfast – even though we’d technically checked out – and I enjoyed the discovery of custard apples, sitting on the veranda surrounded by Ulysses butterflies, orioles and sunbirds and beautiful flowers. Red Mill House Bed and Breakfast – I can thoroughly recommend.

Cairns Capers – A Pentalogy in Three Parts

In yet another (not terribly arduous) struggle of being British in Australia, I am often disorientated by a common pronunciation of this far north Queensland town and assume the Australian speaker has moved the conversation on to the French town of an independent film festival.

I don’t know how many of them are looking at me askance when I persevere in mind of a piled stone way-marker, perhaps because down here I’m untroubled by the facial expressions that may be occurring high up in the stratosphere which are no concern of mine.

Maybe it’s just a Queensland thing.

However the hell you pronounce it, this part of Australia is a pretty bloody amazing place. Salivating on the memory, I am currently in a Ken Behrens (UK – google this …) lockdown, enjoying a bit of late morning sun from the balcony and admiring the austere sides of black mountain with its cloak folds of grey-green eucalypt. Vivid yellow wattle competes with the blue of the sky to challenge the high country note of frost in the air. As winter races towards spring, the mournful cry of a raven keeps me in European thoughts: seasons, the gothic and the now-familiar: dryness, drought, fire. Queensland is tropical and it’s utterly disorientating.

Flying to Cairns/Cannes is worth the ticket just for the view. Screw paying for helicopter flights, just pay attention before you land. There are vine drenched mountains in lovely peaks like whipped meringues that glow purple-green against a blue sky and sea. It all sparkles like it’s been glittered for the occasion and is just like those pictures of paradise a girl from Essex would stare at, never imaging she would really one day see.

We hired a car, got Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds blaring like two respectable road trippers should, and set off. Our route was north to Port Douglas for two nights including a cultural crab-fishing tour on Cooya/Kuya Kuya Beach, a stroll around Mossman Gorge, bird spotting on the Daintree River, up to Cape Tribulation, then back south to Cairns to hop aboard with Coral Sea Dreaming for a day and overnight of snorkelling at Milln Reef on old Great Barrier. And singing la-la-la-lai, a-la-la-la-lai, we were off on another round of croc dodging!

* * * *

‘You know vegetarian is an aboriginal word, right?’

Brandon is looking at me devilishly. I sense a trap.

‘No?’

‘Yup – it means really bad hunter.’

Yeah, fair. But I don’t know how he does it. Brandon Walker and his brother Linc have run Kuku Yalanji Cultural Habitat Tours since 1999, taking people out onto the mudflats to share traditional hunting and cultural practices. He said his grandparents taught him to hunt crabs on the mudflats of Cooya Beach from the age of five. They’d grab me by the ear, he said, tell me to look there, look there, and twist, he said. He learned pretty quick. But when he points out to me the serrated curve in the sand under two inches of water, I reckon I could have walked over it a hundred times and never known a blue swimmer was hiding under the sand. Poke it, he says. I heft my little spear and prod, uncertainly. Ooh, it didn’t like it. The outline suddenly swells three times its size under the sand as it spreads its pincers. Shit. Go on, stab it, Brandon urges. I do it quickly before the bugger can think about it. It was a good hit, I got it through and with a pretty impressive perspective angle, the photo looks like the crab’s half my body size. It wasn’t, but still, I killed it and ate it. I’m not vegetarian, and so much for finding the whole experience confronting, coz I fucking sure showed that crab.

This was my triumph of the day but spending the morning walking along the silver mudflats was good enough on its own. The sky was thinly clouded, and the air was warm and balmy without being fierce. There were so many starfish I could barely avoid treading on them, and memorably, a bull-ray swum right into my shins as I waded through the water.

Just remember I killed that crab. Don’t think about the yelping and shrieking I did, then.

Brandon impressed us all again when he threw a spear into opaque water while accounting for refraction and got the ray in its right wing. He removed the poisoned spar from its tail and threw the little fellow back into the water where it swam away to … heal. He promised. He also promised that the 5m croc that lives over in that estuary and the 4m croc that lives in that other river mouth won’t come onto the mudflats while the tide’s out. Righto.

We collected periwinkles and wirrells for eating and pulled black pearl oysters off the mangrove roots which we shucked and sucked then and there. We ate hibiscus flowers for their quenching flavour, and he showed us how to squeeze drops from the white berries of beach cabbage into our eyes to soothe soreness. We fell over little soldier crabs and held puffer fish in our hands and saw the marks left by dugongs with their young. Brandon told us about his grandfather from the stolen generation; how he was taken from his family but escaped and ran back to his mountains and forests and beaches; how his grandmother was carried right past the officials in a dilly bag; how he has lots of children because his grandfather impressed upon him the notion that ‘they’re trying to kill us all. Spread.’ He told us about travelling around the world, getting up to capers in Manchester, playing professional rugby, playing rhythm guitar and how to tell the weather by looking at the cloud on the mountain. It must be so wonderful to know this is your home, you belong here, I wondered. He smiled. I can just about bear it, he said.

After about two and a half hours it was time to go – but no it wasn’t, because he took us to his folks’ house over the road and cooked all that good stuff up with a brick of butter and intensified garlic and chili marinades. We slurped it all up with deLICious fresh damper, chucking the shells into the bucket between our legs, while Brandon made us jewellery from the wirrell shells we’d collected. He was a legend, his family were lovely, and it was pretty much the Best Day Ever.

After this we went to ‘Wildlife Habitat’ in Port Douglas (it’s a zoo, it’s just a zoo) and I nearly passed out with excitement when we entered a room filled with free-flying birds. I could have stayed there forever dodging wood swallows, finches, and doves while staring at little quails and the bush stone curlew, but the best little chap was a cockatiel who came and sat on my shoulder for about 20 minutes. Wandering around we also saw cassowaries, eclectus parrots, royal spoonbills, lorikeets and black cockatoos. Yup, lost my mind.

Gift of the Gibb – Pt 1

‘So this is it, guys! Jump in.’

In, he said. Well, I didn’t quite know what ‘in’ was. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, and I was cold and needed a wee. I was aware that there was water of an uncertain depth ahead and while I’d like to use the old metaphor of ‘inky black;’ maybe chuck in a ‘gurgling’ to describe it, I’d be lying because I couldn’t see a bloody thing. The light of my feeble headtorch patchily revealed that the valiant Damo – our guide, had stripped down to his shorts and boots and was rubbing his hands together between hunched shoulders. Then that image was gone pretty quick, lost to the gulping blackness. Apart from the wobbling, unenthusiastic glow of his headtorch ebbing away, I could see nothing else.

I stood on the sand, with the Gentleman nudging me; go on, Chris. But why the fuck, I thought, am I in a pitch-dark cave at 6am about to swim in a flood-swollen, frozen creek infested with goddamn crocodiles?

Well, I didn’t want to be left in the dark on me own for a croc to find, so in you go, – and I did that thing I do when getting in water (only recently discovered, as entering the inclement waters of the Irish, Atlantic and North Seas is not something in which sensible Brits indulge), which, it turns out, is hyperventilate the words ‘shit! fuck! fuck! Ok, I’m in, I’m in, shit! fuck’ and there you are, aloft, kick, swim! Hope your boots don’t weight you down, don’t think about the crocs and get to the other side.

This was the first major spot on our tour of the Kimberley; heading from Broome to Darwin: Tunnel Creek. Despite arriving at the stretching crags of a 350million-year-old coral reef at dawn, swimming that cold creek wasn’t even the first impressive thing I’d done that day. No. That was to meaningfully pick up the shovel and disappear off into the bush. But I’d been keen on getting to Tunnel Creek – I’d been lent a book by my shanty man Bruce about the Bunuba people’s resistance to encroaching and violent pastoralists in the 1880s, led by the heroic Jandamara who evaded capture for years by hiding in these caves. I dunno if he had to deal with crocs. And they were certainly there; as we followed the creek’s strips and pools, careful not to stumble and reach out for the wrong half naked person in the dark; little red eyes at the edges of the caves where they cringed, spread like butter against the walls. Bloody hell. And then walk towards the light, and relief dripped off me, along with the water, as daylight emerged at the other end of the tunnel, festooned with trees, littered with heron and loud with peace. Until Damo pointed out the long, deep imprint of an enormous reptilian tail in the sand, heading from whence we’d come.

‘Right guys, back through the creek again, then!’

FUCK’s sake.

On our way back, we encountered three noisy lads on giant, unicorn inflatables with tinnies. Now we’ve read a lot about crocs, or ‘croncs’ as the Gentleman has affected to call them. Salties can live in fresh or salt water and have a gland that removes the salt. They can come up to 100km upriver. They like to eat small calves, or wallabies, or wallaby sized humans like children and Chrissies. They can lean back on their tail as if it was a fifth leg, just like kangaroos, so pealing you off the roof of your ute isn’t much of an issue. They can even, apparently, climb up waterfalls. Jesus. We have agreed that, along with its weather, you don’t fuck with Australian wildlife. The hippy mantra ‘they’re more scared of you than you are of them,’ rather underestimates the boofhead courage of your average 5 metre fucking salty. But here’s an observation from The Brit Abroad, West Australians and Northern Territorians certainly have an impressive risk tolerance. Or commendable courage. Or they’re just fucken nuts. I pondered the gleeful shouts of those floating blokes the next day while drinking a cup of tea by the bank of the incomparable Manning Creek at 7am, breath caught by the misty golden beauty of the morning. Little fish swam right up to the edge where I sat, then spun round to rub their backs on the sand and flash their silver bellies to the sky. I sipped me tea and watched a white egret on the rock in the middle of the river, patient and still, next to an equally motionless penguin. … … … Why the hell is there a penguin in the Kimberley. I shaded my eyes from the sun, and it shifted, revealing the long neck of a white bellied cormorant. Righto. Animals are secretive and deceitful in this country. Remember that, Chris. What else do you need to remember? Shit. Eyes widening, I hastily interrogated the sand. I couldn’t see any croc tracks, but I took the opportune moment to get the hell away from the river’s edge.

An Ironic Homage to J A Baker, from Canberra

18^th September

Up early but headed out late, after the commuter lull. The morning was white and limpid, flushed blue at the edges of the wide sky. The light green of new trees glows even when there is no sun upon it and makes the stomach curve upward, glad. Plover thrum on the lake like engines turning over in tense indecision and rosellas smear their beaded blood red on the branches. I creep by, trying to sidle up close enough to see them without frightening them away in ghastly animal misinterpretation. But they can read no benign intentions in our looming forms. Even the magpie that learns to recognise the human that scatters it seeds and swoops to collect them, will eat as if in spite of us. No terror outweighs the of the death scent of man.

The strange metal poles of parliament squat beyond the lake like a deformed giant spider. I think of the tercel then, where it eats its prey somewhere there, manipulated by man to scare away magpies and ducks and keep the seat of order and coal policy clean of bird shit. What its golden eyes see of the territory from the gold zenith higher than the geometrically incorporated hills – thousands of feet higher in the stillness of air above undulations of clouds and wind stratospheres. I fling myself up with the peregrine then, where the human taint is bleached out by the burning purity of nuclear white light.

Down to the lake and dawn floats on the tides. This place is wide and exposed, with its lake, rivers and tree shrouded hills in silver mist trembling away into the hot heart of the centre. An incomparable wideness that lifts off the top of the head then slams it down again with the weight of space. The lake throws the violent blue of the sky up and swells the chest and arms until the land is the sky and everything is birds flying on it, our atoms scattered on the wind of so much room. On the edge of the lake I find the first kill. A grey pigeon at the side of the manicured path on a dark smear of blood; a mess of white and grey feathers haloed around. It has a perfect hole in its stomach cavity, a gaping cave. The scolding pee-wees wing clear of its omen. I look up to the flag of parliament again, my eyes sewed to the sky like buttons straining against the bulging desire to see the peregrine. He did not come.

Crow Mother

For aunties and surrogates everywhere.

And for Reuben

Everyone and no one understands the mystery of birth. The superlative creation that any woman can do, if she wants to. Pouring living things out of her, slimy things that wriggle and scream – unlike the dry dead promises of men.

Something animal and entirely Godly. The screams and grunts a woman makes as she digs into a deep and primal place to bring forth her child are more abandoned than any that animal musters. Like dancing; primal and poetic – birthing is too. The wild circles of cries painted in the air – blended whorls of relief, pain, wonder.

This is not a Christmas story.

But a child was born.

*****

He came into the world and blinked – huge black myopic eyes. They tell me all babies are glass blue-eyed when they’re born.

He was not.

His cave-black eyes still reflected the dark safe womb and he stared down at the shadowed table – for comfort. The world is so cold, so loud, so hard. Everything hurts. His skin is as soft as insides and instead we show him edges. Horrified, he screams his way into the world and only those soft dark things – flesh, crevices, darkness comfort him against a world so sharp, so bright and green it hurts.

Mother crow heard him cry. All crows are mothers and aunts and when they hear a baby cry their breasts tug, their lower parts hurt, and it wells together to engender their desperate wailing caw.

No crow can hear a child cry without pouring out her own wail in sympathy.

*****

The little child was loved, so loved, and he was dressed in white and laid in his cradle in the garden in the shade of a great eucalyptus tree. The breeze stirred the leaves to peek through and whispered ‘oh! What a lovely child!’ And the tree jealously wrapped round its trailing tresses so it could keep the lovely child to itself. The bees loved the flowers then followed the budding glow of the child and said to each other ‘he izzz lovely’ and the flowers craned their necks to look at him. Birds flitted down to sing him lullabies.

The child dimly smelled milk and honey. Colours were bright and smudgy. In the glow, he felt better – much better. The sun was warm and soft on his little cheeks; his blankets were soft and edgeless and this new sensation of the gentle breeze and birdsong was lovely to his sightless eyes.

The bees and the trees and the craning clematis and all the flowers agreed he was beautiful, beautiful and they loved him deeply.

And in the garden, under the apple tree, the fairies felt it. They heard the talk of the flowers and the bees and trees and the birds and resolved to take this beautiful baby for their own.

*****

A woman – animal – primal – civilized – creator – walks into her garden with a book and milk; milk for her child.

The cradle is empty.

Her wail lifts and pierces the grey sky.

*****

In fairy land, the changeling child is doted on and loved. Fairies bring him milk and honey and tickle his toes. They sing to him. He is rocked in a cradle woven with dog roses and willowherb and the hawthorn fragrance soothes him on the bank by the stream. The bee sucks at the cowslip and the baby sleeps.

Are fairies wicked? Are they parts of nature? Is the bee wicked for taking the pollen from the rose? We devise romances – she is the go-between, passing love notes between rose and apple blossom until soaked in warm sun and scent, they meld together. Maybe this is like what fairies do.

Or maybe if you are left alone too long, they steal babies away to fairy land out of jealousy – like Oberon jealous of Titania’s changeling boy – and refuse to give them back.

*****

The little child had serious eyes. He awoke to find he was surrounded by ladybirds, moths and newts. He cast his dark eyes down because he remembered his milk and scented mother and she wasn’t there. Then with a crinkling of his smooth brow, like silk crumpled, he closed his eyes on flower and fairy, opened his mouth and cried.

Mother crow, black huge mother, felt his cry pierce her heart and opened her beak to wail.

Mother crow sobbed and wept at the despair of the little child. She hopped down, heavy from her high branch and crept silver-eyed towards him. She laid down her head on his tiny chest to hear him cry and nestled there, burrowed there, with her eyes closed while crystal tears moistened his cheeks and fists. She put her head on his aching heart and felt it – took it –as she nudged in.

And her own heart broke.

Hearing the fading suspiration of her last cry, the other crows flocked down from their high branches, desperate for their sister who had died for the sadness of a human baby. They set up their wail in chorus till the echo lanced the fairies and the people above fairyland, and together the crows carried the baby boy home to his mother.

Mother crow – who loves children so much she keens in despairing fellow feeling when she hears a baby cry – was carried home with the changeling child and brought out of fairy land; back to the garden. Mother crow laid open eyed and dead upon his breast, but he slept; comforted, with his tiny arm around her wing.

Mother came out into the garden and rejoiced in the sunlight to find her beautiful child restored.