Visions of Johanna: Coastal Musings

I find myself contemplating the world in both micro and macro on a stretch of beach I'd like to call lonely and wild, like I used to, but a steady stream of hikers walk from east to west here late afternoon, marking the stretch of sand with poles and bare feet whilst dangling boots from packs. Not too many you'd call a crowd, but more people than I remember being on this beach, even in the halycon days of youth where we'd all pack into the small carpark and grassy paddocks to free camp, drink beer and walk whilst the boys surfed the huge waves in the cold and wild waters of 'down south', as we'd call it. More south west, but hey.

Jim throws in a line hoping for Australian salmon or gummy shark, but it might be still too cold for that. I oddly think of salmon in football beanies and scarves, but my mind does do weird things. I watch the gulls land the tiny sand mites squirm around in the soil. As usual, there's life if you look hard enough. In the late sunlight long legged insects fuck amongst the cooler shade of the rocks. I think of the importance of insects, though we'd spend long summer afternoons slapping biting march flies between sunblock smeared hands, spraying ourselves unwittingly with aeroguard.

Last week I read an article on the decline of bird life, particularly in America and Europe as Australia just hasn't done the monitoring. 29 percent fewer birds in North America than in 1970. In Germany, 77 per cent of that country's insects have disappeared since 1989. And on the pier in Lorne Point last week, an old Greek guy waved his hands in the air as he lamented the lack of fish - because 25 years ago, the fishing 'was good here', he said. Whilst it's easy to dismiss folk tales of 'back in the day' as poor science, they're all we have got to go by here.

We only really recognise dramatic changes, rather than subtle ones. And how would the Lorne fisherman's grandkids know different, when that is it all it has ever been for him? Many climate change denying Australians attribute it to boom or bust cycles - in a country that has little rain then a lot of rain, insects, birds and animals will mate like crazy when the conditions are good, and then seem to disappear when it's not. And they're right, too. But how to explain the larger changes across time? Australia can't be immune to decline in species just because we have no real data for it. And we're better to be safer than sorry - hence the outcry against the damage the Adani mine in Northern Queensland threatens to local wildlife populations. You only get once chance at this stuff.

Thus, I think about shifting baselines, as it's called in ecology.

Shifting Baseline Syndrome is a psychological measure where we don't recognise changes unless they are sudden and dramatic - the razed forest due to bushfire, for example. The new generation, however, would have only known the absence of the forest. Billions fewer birds, the absence of fish in the southern oceans of Victoria, more intense bushfires - to them, this is the baseline of normality.

This place is part of my identity - of my childhood, of who I am - or was - as a wild ocean girl. My son learnt to count watching the sun go down here. My best friend's family had a shed on the Johanna Blue road, the bluestone chipped alternative road that winds treachourously through hills to the sea. There was a small pot bellied stove, a dusty double bed and a single, and we'd cart water from the property across the road, read her father's surfing magazines, smoke joints, draw, write, dream, whilst the huge waves crashed into our dreams.

And these visions of Johanna, they kept me up past the dawn - Bob Dylan

And so I think about the subjective of human experience on this wild and not so lonely beach, watching the sun go down. I ponder my reactions to the camping fees for a once free spot, the more people on this coastline that makes it a little less wild and free. I ponder why I feel such a sense of ownership, which is not really my right at all, because over by those rocks, the man sitting reading whilst the sun goes down belongs here too, and the man with the hired kombi and his three kids playing cricket, and the group of older woman who've hiked in for the night. They all feel something for this beautiful place. Reverence. Awe. Joy. Love.

Perhaps it's a sense of nostalgia that sets me a dreamin' of what was, and what is, and what will be. It does me no good, of course, except for the tearful poetic foolings that might arise from such reveries. The sun still rises, the insects still bite, the gulls still hope for bits of flesh in discarded bait. Occasionally the fisherman pull their fish from the tides.

This is still a beautiful place. I have no right to call it my own - it is a pleasure for all who dwell a while here. I might miss the lonely beaches that were, and worry about shifting baselines that speak of terrible changes to a much loved landscape, but for now, it is truly beautiful.

I just wish people wouldn't stand between me and my sunset.

---

---

@naturalmedicine II Discord Invite II #naturalmedicine

Discord 🧘About