I’m in Newtown, Sydney for the weekend. It’s a strange and not altogether pleasant place for a naturalist to be, but despite the veritably swarming humanity, there are still vestiges of an original topography and ecology persisting here. Allow me to relate a few of my observations and impressions. I hope you won’t mind me adopting a present tense, it’s easier storytelling that way.
The first thing I notice upon waking in the small flat where we have temporary refuge, is the distinct deficit of lyrebirds. Normally, at this time of year, there’s at least one frisky male singing up the dawn on the forested slopes behind our house. But even as I listen more carefully and deliberately now from my warm doona-haven, the only wild nature I hear is a pair of Pied Currawongs, striving to hold down a conversation over the relentless fire-hose of chaotic noise emerging from King Street. I’ll wager they already know about the fruiting purple lily pilly I spotted yesterday afternoon in the back laneway.
It is highly probable of course, that superb lyrebirds did once forage in the moist sandstone gullies of this colonised landscape, and, given the seemingly lamentable arc of human endeavour, they may again in the future. Ah, here is a familiar muse of mine – to contemplate the world without us. I shall resist the digression.
Later, while walking along King Street in search of a stiff brew (a ritualised errand of some urgency) I pondered something I’d read somewhere about how the street lays allegedly atop a traditional Gadigal clan walking trail. I try to imagine countless generations of unhindered Aboriginal families lightly strolling along this once-forested westerly ridge as they moved camp between the pristine shores of Sydney Harbour and Botany Bay. Then, nearly colliding with a puffer-jacket-wearing lady dragging her fancy-poodle-familiar, my mind is recalled to deal with the necessities of the present moment.
My last thought before weaving through traffic to reach a bustling café, is that the Gadigal people did not cede this land to the colonisers of New Town willingly. There was much violence done here. That much we ought not forget.
Coffee in hand now, I can finally peruse the street properly. Almost immediately I see a pair of welcome swallows winging back and forth above the traffic with the same effortless, aerial grace they exhibit everywhere. Though I sharpen my gaze for some minutes, I cannot spot a single flying insect in the rising exhaust fumes. Shortly afterwards, my attention is arrested by a homeless man squatting silently in the sun across the road from us.
“His enormous, strangler-fig-like-dreadlocks and matted beard seem magically woven into an assortment of swaddled blankets.”
I’m struck by his absolute stillness, despite people having to walk around him as if he were a mossy boulder in the path of flowing water. And then another vision comes to mind, that of the furry pademelons back home, who love nothing more than to sit silently in open patches of forest and bask in the warmth of morning sunshine.
Later, after a bout of productive op-shop foraging, we return past the same spot but the sun has moved on now and where the basking sadhu had been, there remained only a discarded cocoon of filthy-looking blankets, much like when a cicada metamorphoses, before alighting skywards to start a new life.
Photo credit: Dorothy Jenkins.