Today I needed time on my ownsome. After a morning paddle - the surf is flat now - I headed up to the lighthouse, about twenty minutes from Green Point.
The landscape was really varied which is why was really fun about this walk. There wasn't so much a labelled track, just a disused service track and a track leading to the sea.
The rocky outcrops were really cool, rising like manmade standing stones out of the bush. It would have been even better in the sunshine or at golden hour, but although it was grey, it was warm enough and very still.
I wandered along the shoreline for quite a ways til finding a track back up to the lighthouse. Alot of my experience was impressions, as such:
Great cormorants and pacific gulls take frightened flight, and on the shoreline the carcass of a giant feathered thing rots. Imprints of landed aviators on the sand. There's wombat burrows, square scat telling. Wild bees. Tiny fish in fingerling pools, protected from waves coming home to shore. Red and orange, green lichen. Carpet of pigface leading down to shore - in season you could glut on the fruit. Salty and slightly bitter samphire, out of season. Smatterings of rain. Tiny yellow flowers, pink too. Grasses. Rocky outcrops, sentinels of stone. Sponges, driftwood, cuttlefish, bones. Warrigul greens. Fossils, shells, stones shot through with quartz. Twisted wire, bottles, seaglass. Kelp in varying stages of decay. Blue starfish. Africa to the far, far, far west and Antarctic way below. White sand tracks. The lighthouse leading me back up to the road.
What I haven't been able to stop thinking about is what I read this morning about Aboriginal art on rocks to the north a few kilometers. I was all set to go find it as it sounded incredible - concentric circles and lines on rocks just above the waterline. Some of it was taken for the Hobart museum in the 60s. It's over 2000 years old and meant to be the best rock art in Australia, if not the world.
Sadly though it was buried purposefully under sand to stop it eroding.. that was in the 1970s!!! So for 50 years no one has seen it. Isn't that crazy?
In the afternoon we walk up the other end of Mawsons Bay again, closer to the site of the rock art. You can get a sense of the size if you can spot my friend under the cliff. Beautiful.
The it was time for a shower.. very makeshift but it was good to destink a little!
From tomorrow I'll be fully on my own again. I'm not sure where I am headed, but it's kinda cool to finally be solo. It's what I wanted, after all. I do miss my hubs desperately though. Funny how you can crave space and miss someone at the same time. Life is just lovelier with him around. I'm certainly looking forward to a snuggle.
