I started writing my autobiography just over a year ago. Maybe I’m halfway. This time last week I was feeling overwhelmed, with chronology and what to include or not. Today, after a few breakthrough days, I realise it is the same as making a dance work (but longer). There is the engrossing research, the accumulation of material, the overwhelm moments, then the connections begin to click, the satisfying stripping back, the tweaking.
Anyway, in celebration here’s today’s addition to the through-line of ‘walking into writing’
27 August 2024
(Holland Street to Murray Street, Thebarton)
It’s windy but that stretch of river path I didn’t do on the last walk is down low to the river, protected. It’s a short stretch but I’ll take a notebook and I can have a hot chocolate at that café on Holland when I finish. I have the GoPro to get detail from other angles and to give me a mediated experience to write about later…I had the hot chocolate but I didn’t take a pen so all the written impressions will be solely from watching the video.
Fade up walking the path. It’s a perfect composition of vertical thirds—green bank left, path diminishing forward centre, green to river right. The shadows of the trees lay like dancers doing floorwork with a giggle of gusted foliage. I’m impressed by the Steadicam effect of using the GoPro stick. I’m gliding but can still sense the pulsing of blood and breath in my gait. View reaches upward, leafy headdresses atop slender forms. Now the thickness of space between becomes apparent—to me, having read Abram’s ‘shadow’ chapter—the three-dimensional shadow that extends from trunk to ground. The gentle footfalls deny the wildness of the winds above. A tree with Siamese trunks, joined below ground, beckons me to it, to that negative space charged positively. I move in close to the sister that leans into the path and stop the video playback to see the detail. Textures of bark red, brown, grey, gnarled, warty surfaces and snapped sinews, sap-scabbed openings criss-crossed with spider web sutures. There is a man-made object, a lid (perhaps from a spraycan) lodged that I didn’t notice at the time. Just past there I pause to feel the movement of the river—hardly any. It lays wounded along here, evident from the other bank’s perspective. A third eye in the fork of that tree. Shadow flocks screeching for my attention, laying a thrashing conveyor belt before me. The warehouses across the river come into view as the path ascends now. I move in toward the plant with small white flowers but my back is facing north so my shadow comes into view and I quickly move away. Usually a sign of clumsy camera work, unusable footage, but I like my appearance here—the gravity of my presence, the lurch of interruption. An Emperor butterfly crosses my path and I try to follow it. It lands, I lean, it leaves. The trees are barn-dancing overhead. A fence appears leading up to path’s end. A double-railed structure that reminds me of the horses’ fence down near the beach. The planks are iced in aerosol frosting, all indecipherable. I wonder why someone would scar the world with messages no-one can read, like so many tattoos. Now, tree tops meet power lines and path’s end meets wire fenced yard where workers are eating lunch out of plastic containers. A sign saying “No Dumping, Fines Apply,” obscured by more cryptic added messages, is next to an upended shopping trolley.
Return trip. The sun becomes protagonist decorating the lens with little flares. Lighting a white moth. Now I can zoom in on that flower unseen. It is like a miniature starfish with red tips on each tentacle. Small clouds of insects are now visible, the aerial dance of hidden communities. Do they feel the heat of my body? A trunk with slashes and potholes. Is it showing me its history of encounter with passing traffic or inner pressure? Low leaves stroke the lens. Flash. Shadow sinking into river. I scan upwards to a wound in a trunk and a bark hand reaches for me. We’ve seen each other, tree and me. The park bench is half hiding into some fallen branches and backed into the bank. It’s not calling me to sit. The long grasses are swirling around it. The path is painted like a Kandinsky backdrop, all knees and elbows kinking out from an arthritic backbone. (see featured image)
I pass under the leaning twin again noticing the rake of its projection. Moving off onto the grass I pause to catch a flicker of cascade in the water, a small conversation between river and rock. Some rubber lacework in the ground at a tree’s base. A catchment to stop the path falling away? The shadow dance now like violin tremolos, woodwind melodies. Pause and look up. See the majesty of this gum rising and reaching a dozen or more metres above me. A sweet trio of trunks is a frame to view through showing me an almost invisible shimmer of water reflected on the opposite bank. Like a trick of the light. I gasp.
Descending, there is movement in the river now, larger rocks forming a bridge, putting bass lines in the liquid song. Motion arrested—a hut built in overhanging branches, all matted and pining downstream. My own personal parade saluted by tree tops waving my procession on. The fluffy tops of rushes point in the direction of my travel, their discarded skin wrapping around a trunk like a nest. All signs of past misadventure. A soggy collection of clothing and bedding drapes over a pile of rocks. I think about Indian women pounding washing. Acacia flower pats me on the shoulder and taps the camera hello. I stand on a rock for a higher view of the river, the camera catches my shoe tips peeking into shot. The upward path fence approaches with a dirt track forking down to the left. I follow it down to the water’s edge. Bubbles in the water flow around a central rock, a bird’s eye view of Mecca. I look up and do a pirouette. Finally I turn the camera toward myself, my head and shoulders centre frame. I’m wearing the green corduroy hat, my hair tucked away, and I look a lot like Mum in that photo of her on her last birthday. The same slight smile and direct eye contact that was so uncharacteristic of her when faced with a camera (I’m sure it was some hint of seizure that I was seeing in her then).
I smile, look around and back to camera. Fade out.