Tasmanian Beaches: Exploring the Coast on Foot, by Bicycle, Kayak and Sail

Derwent River: Blinking Billy to Hinsby Beach: Part 8

February 8, 2016

Naming it up

The places I’ve identified have given me the slip so I’m mentally doing circles around High School Point and the beach some call Beck’s, some call Melinga and some call nothing at all to have a little think about the local expression of the human mind.

This is because in misleading myself when it comes to naming, I’m sure I’ve misled you. Perhaps the cartographers, surveyors and the Nomenclature Board have not chatted enough over tea breaks or scheduled sufficient meetings, given that for many years they’ve been part of the same division in the same government agency. This occurred to me because more research this past week indicated one of two things: 1. I’ve misinterpreted local writers’ beach identification or 2. The locals simply cannot agree, are occasionally geographically challenged and at other times are simply not precise enough to help confused readers out. A case in point, Karringal Court is not south of High School Point as one of the authors I read would have it. Whatever, the maps themselves have so very little to say!

Nomenclature, generally, is further complicated because where no formal name exists the Aboriginal community have naming rights. But they are made up of several communities and they don’t all know a place by a single name. Take the Derwent River itself. It has more than one Palawa name. According to a member of the Channel community, their name for the river is unlikely to be formally recognised. I was given this name on a small piece of paper I can no longer find, which is a shame. The name is beautiful.

The second point of difficulty is in negotiating on names with government. I had a chat to someone from the Aboriginal Community when I was at Risdon Cove. They said the government drags its feet. I spoke to someone in government. They said it’s hard to get representatives of the Aboriginal community to the table.

I revisited the foreshore and was pleased to encounter a local who told me he’d been walking these beaches since 1948. An expert, surely!

’Becks, Dixons and Retreat,’ I asked. ‘Can you confirm I’ve got them in the right order?’ He looked at me blankly.

‘I’ve never heard of them,’ he said. ‘The one you’re calling Beck’s I know as Melinga Place Beach. Why would it be called Beck’s anyway?’

I went home. I reopened my books and I clicked through web pages. I rediscovered an article by Reg Escott on the Taroona Book Digitised website, who in his article on Taroona’s boat sheds explains that Taroona has five beaches. Starting at Grange Point, they are:

Retreat Beach [my impression was that he means the whole long strip starting from Grange Beach (not named) and ending at Retreat Cove, the northern beach on ‘High School Point’]

Retreat Cove [the one I thought was Dixons, on the northern section of ‘High School Point’]

Dixons Beach [in front of the high school, south of ‘High School Point’]

Beck’s Beach [Melinga Place beach]

Taroona Crescent Beach [Taroona Beach]

Hinsby Beach.

Have a look for yourself. It’s an interesting read if you’d like to know more about boat sheds (of which there were many more in the past) – or are keen to stumble across a clue or two as to the interesting placement and formations of boulders / rocks around these beaches. They have been moved, post invasion/settlement.

I came to two conclusions.

Beach identity is (always) in a state of flux along this shoreline. For eg, Beck’s is named for a land owner (and perhaps before that was called Mitchells after an earlier owner bearing that name) but now it’s transitioning to being named for a street. Dixon had a farm somewhere in Taroona.
We keep messing with the landscape. Had the road not been built down to the shoreline, Beck’s and Dixons (if I’m identifying these correctly) would be one beach.

But, guess what? I probably still don’t have the order right. This morning I revisited the Taroona 1:25 000 map (no 5224) and this is the nomenclature that’s listed, north to south:

The Grange Picnic Area (at Cartwright Point! Go figure.)

Cartwright Creek

Cartwright Point

Dixons Reef (in the region of Karringal Court)

Dixons Beach (which I’d figured was Retreat Cove – see above)

High School – the site indicated but the point not named

Crayfish Point

Taroona Beach

Alum Cliffs

That’s pretty meagre and laxadaisical, if you ask me, given this map is supposed to be authoritative. What’s more, The Listmap, supposedly the most current source, given that it’s online, has even less information! And so I’m giving up. Here, in this city of 250,000 people more or less, we know and care so little about the coastline we haven’t named it up. The alternative view is that the coastline rejects our spurious naming methodology, if it can even be called that. Why name something so grand and long enduring after unexceptional land owners? Why name it’s spots but not it’s freckles?

I like the view of the coastline slipping free of its transient names, even though names would be so helpful when you want to text your lift your whereabouts. May it stay wild and secret in the city forever. And perhaps Andrew Short who numbers the beaches, and my friend, who is fine with degrees of latitude and longitude but not with names have a point because if we’re not in a relationship with the coast, and we don’t value it, then it’s nothing but a nameless stranger to us after all.

Moon over Grange compressed — The moon rising over the boulder at Grange Beach

Apart from the links above, see the Place Names Tasmania database. Here’s the official document on the rules with regard to assigning Tasmanian place names.

Derwent River: Blinking Billy to Hinsby Beach: Part 7: Reaching High School Point

February 2, 2016

The Name Confusion Never Ends

Detail: baby mussels and limpets on rock — A detail from this walk: mussels and limpets exposed by the tide

The eucalypt that had confused me as I approached Grange Beach a little earlier in the walk had done so because my next waypoint, already known to me, was another bleached eucalypt lying prone across pebbles and sand, supported on the tiptoes of its branches. But now, walking along south of Grange Beach I was still trying to clarify the coastline in my head. Where, really, did Grange begin and end? Why was what I was seeing not according with what I’d read in Short’s inventory?

I rounded a slight point and finally reached the eucalypt I’d encountered the previous Sunday, a day that had begun sluggishly because I’d been reading Cheryl Strange’s book Wild, about her long walk down the Pacific Crest Trail, well into into the early hours of the morning. It had made me itchy to get out and walk beaches again, especially as so much of my time had been spent on Samos, back in the water finally after a long time on the slip, but still needing new batteries and a new anchor. Down at the boat that Sunday, ready to do some work, the geo and I realised we could do nothing – the shipbuilder had one of our keys and we’d forgotten the other – and so, with just a short space in my day before heading off on a beekeeping course, I’d set off on my initial sortie into Taroona to identify beach access points.

I’d parked the car at the southern end of Flinders Esplanade and found a path that led down to the beach beside a double story house. This path followed the short, steep edge of a gully that was the home of a rivulet. At the bottom of the cliff a huge, bleached eucalypt tree stretched across the sand. On the other (southern side of the rivulet) another path ascended.

KARINGAL COURT 2 the eucalypt — The prone eucalypt at the bottom of Karingal Court

I thought initially that I was on the beach that Short calls T458 (aka Blinking Billy Beach 3 – yep, I know; I was very confused!) because he describes that as being a narrow reflective sand and rocky beach that extends along the base of 20-30 m high bluffs for 200m. Only this wasn’t that long – or then again, maybe on a different tide it was? I also thought that it might be T459 which he describes as extending south of the sloping 20m high Cartwright Point. When I read this I still thought that Cartwright Point was actually High School Point visible in the distance, so it didn’t make sense. (He says of T459 that it’s a narrow eroding beach, is backed by vegetated bluffs that rise to 20m in the south, that there are houses on top of them and steps at the northern end. Not knowing the shoreline to the north at all that Sunday, I decided for the time being that this was the one I was on, not thinking twice about the steps at Grange Beach.

Welcome to my geographically confused world!

I hadn’t had time on that Sunday visit to walk north of the eucalypt, otherwise I’d have realised then that in the absence of a firm nomenclature there are different ways of viewing the coastline. Short, it seems, has taken a larger coastal/geomorphological perspective and identified longer strips – the three Blinking Billy Beaches with the third extending to Mitah Crescent (I think), and Dixons extending south from Grange Avenue to Taroona High School and High School Point. It was only when I revisited on a summer spring tide that I saw that on this strip Grange, Karringal and Dixons really do become one.

One long beach — Karingal Court, Grange Beach, Dixon Beach merge on a spring low tide, Jan 2016

That Sunday, I simply walked about on the shrunken sandy portion of the beach as far as I could go, which wasn’t far as the tide was quite high. It was indeed narrow here, and as you can see, there are a lot of cobbles and sand and a reef. I found a quite astonishing square rock pool carved into a huge boulder that looked at first like a boat and then like a plane. It’s at the southern end close to the geologically interesting cliff that barred my way further south on that particular tide.

So on my long walk I sauntered along knowing that at some point I’d see the bleached and fallen eucalypt below Karringal Court and when I did the somewhat longer beach thrilled me just as much the second time, although I paused with concern to reconsider the dank little rivulet trapped behind a buildup of pebbles.

Karingal Court looking north up its beach — Revisited: The beach below Karingal Court on the spring low tide, Jan 2016.

From here I could see past the pebble strip I was on to how the beach I assumed was Dixon’s curves to the point at the High School and that, in fact, this wasn’t all that far away.

There is a path you’re encouraged to take as your near the high school, but I’d come back after my beekeeping course was over, and walked that then, trying to shrug off a small despair that had nothing to do with the keeping of bees. That path sometimes uses streets, sometimes paths through bush and across grassy spaces, and sometimes brings you to cliff tops and as a result I was beginning to wonder about the geography behind the beach too.

Rather than choosing this path again I continued along the pebbles beneath tall yellow, unconsolidated cliffs before I stepped onto the beach that I’d identified as the one Sue Mount refers to as Dixons, but which, on a more recent visit, some locals spread on towels told me they simply call High School beach. They did not know it had another name.

Quiet view from Karingal — High School Point from Karingal Court beach, Taroona

As I walked along Dixons I kept a closer lookout for middens but the evidence I found was frail and barely present. I stopped to try and make sense of a layout of rocks that brought fish traps to mind, but if Tasmanian aborigines did not eat fish from 3700 years ago onwards – there was a dietary transition at this point (Johnson & McFarlane, 2015) – then why would they have built a trap, if that’s what it is? I must be one of many who have thought about this because on that later visit one of the people I stopped to chat with on this beach had wondered the same thing and as archaeologists have visited the midden on Dixons, they must have regarded/disregarded this feature too. It doesn’t feature in Jim Stockton’s Tasmanian Naturalist article on the matter.

I rounded the point I thought was Cartwright’s, puzzled, because it was disassociated from the reserve to which it was supposed to be attached. Instead the school grounds rise behind it. Is there a school anywhere else in Australia that has such a fantastic setting – surrounded by two beaches and a third (Retreat) across the road really just artificially divided from the other two?

There was a small cluster of seabirds hanging out on the boulders at the point (not Cartwright’s at all, but High School Point, just to be clear). There nearly always are seabirds here and, buoyed by this fabulous walk, I adjusted the pick up arrangements and then I carried on walking.

(Andrew Short’s report is referenced on The Bookshelf page).

Johnson, M & I McFarlane. 2015. Van Diemen’s Land: an aboriginal history, UNSW, Sydney

Derwent River: Blinking Billy to Hinsby Beach: Part 6: Grange Beach

January 24, 2016

I Thought I Recognised You!

I had to boulder hop around Cartwright’s point because between cliff and river the rocks grow larger (I wondered why) and for a moment I was stopped by (and confused by) a fallen eucalypt, aged and bleached, that I had to navigate. These are boulders seabirds retire to when they want to simply relax and stare out across the river. I saw two or three, but it was clear from the guano on their favourite boulders that this area is a regular haunt.

Approaching Grange Beach -eucalypt — The waves reclaim: Unsupported by the cliffs, great trees fall

There was one more enormous boulder I had to walk around, a boulder that protects its secret from the northerly winds – and then I was there, in the tiny cove that I remembered.

You would have no idea that at the bottom of leafy Grange Avenue below the Channel Highway (down past Mary’s Grange retirement village and just past the little grassy island in the road between the two cul de sacs) there is a path to a beach – except that a sign, seemingly disconnected to anything around it, says No Dogs. That’s when you notice that what you assumed was a garden path actually provides access to a beach.

The northern path to Grange Beach — The northern way

For most Hobartians there’s no real reason to wander down this road and the locals seem to keep the presence of the beach a secret. I hadn’t heard of it before but it had been an exhilarating discovery the previous week when I was sniffing around the streets of Taroona looking for access points to the shoreline.

That day I had walked a little tentatively down that path that leads to a numbered garden gate and was relieved to discover that another path diverged to the right. It was picturesque and I was taking photos of its loveliness and the surprise of being surrounded by garden when my iPhone died. I could hear the crash of waves but they were hidden by a hedge as I walked down the short, steep steps and I was literally on the beach before I could see what I thought was the cove’s full extent. The northern view was hidden behind huge boulders but to the south about midway along the ribbon of pebbles between the water and the bush I could make out a waypoint, also a recent discovery, further to the south.

The waves that day had been surprisingly large and vigorous. I had stood on the sand and laughed. How amazing! Another beach discovered, perfect for a beach umbrella and a good book in the summertime, within 20 minutes of home.

Arriving on the beach again I saw that it had changed with the tide and was a little longer than I’d originally taken it to be because it extended south to two boatsheds I hadn’t taken much notice of on my previous visit. I walked the small beach and paused to regard them. A rivulet, no doubt called Grange Rivulet, entered the beach beside them and I walked up it a little way to clarify my location. I was at the bottom of the southern cul de sac off Grange Road and I saw that a path diverted up to the top of the cliffs behind the beach. I would be coming back!

Grange Rivulet — It’s a short distance from the source to the river but the rivulet wears a concrete corset

Looking down the south path to Grange Beach — The southern way: the path over Grange Rivulet, down to the beach

In front of me was another long, narrow pebble strip. I could see two men a little further along and at the far end I had a clear view of Taroona High School and so I set off again wondering what my next surprise would be but also quite disappointed that I was nearing the end of my route – I had arranged to be picked up at the High School.

South from Grange Beach — The long view south

The two men on the rock turned out to be fishers. From their accents I could tell that they were new arrivals to the country, perhaps refugees. The fishing was not good, but they said they came here quite often to fish, and just a little further on I was surprised to see their family group – the mothers and the children, sitting and playing on the rocks. Perhaps they are the people who have so beautifully decorated an old dead tree with bleached shells.

The shell tree and fisher — Tree of Shells

The geology of the Grange cliffs — Friable cliff face near Grange Beach

Derwent River: Blinking Billy to Hinsby Beach – Part 5: Cartwright Point

January 11, 2016

Blind to the Landscape: Cartwright out of Order

Our story is in the land … it is written in those sacred places … My children will look after those places, That’s the law.

Bill Neidjie , Kakadu elder.

In quite quick succession, with the cliffs far lower now, I was passing large houses and small boat sheds and from the Mouheenener Sentinel (see part 3), where the view of Taroona began to open up, I was particularly preoccupied with the lack of birds, the non-stick nomenclature and the dimensions of the shoreline – what was a beach and what a separating reef, had totally befuddled me because I could not get them to accord with my memory of what I had read of this section in Andrew Short’s vast inventory of beaches.

First sighting of Cartwright Point — Taroona in my sights

This estuary is expansive and should be rich with life. Not so far away the Derwent merges with the waters of Storm Bay and the D’Entrecasteaux Channel and yet it struck me with some force that birds had not been a presence on my walks – a handful of gulls, a cormorant, an oyster catcher of two, a heron, period. This shoreline seemed as good a place as any to encounter great avian flocks but this was far from being the case. I was thinking about how the early explorers recorded the migratory short tailed shearwaters darkening the skies as their huge flocks passed overhead for days on end, and their descriptions of the river alive with whales and fish so that there must also have been huge numbers of gannets, gulls and cormorants diving. There were also a great number of land birds, some now extinct (eg the Tasmanian emu), available for hunting through the she-oaks and the eucalypts when the colony began so that it can seem, reading the literature, that the Reverend Knopwood’s gun was only silent when he was enjoying convivial drinks in town or sermonising from his pulpit. But it’s winter, I reasoned. Maybe that’s part of the problem. Perhaps the remnants of those great flocks are still sizeable and are occupying themselves elsewhere.

Even as I approached the Sandy Bay-Taroona boundary which I assumed was the bend in the road near the Truganini Reserve, I was still pretty clueless as to my precise whereabouts but I did know I was about to leave Sandy Bay, and so, to illustrate the difference between the rivulets of the past and the present, a final quote:

‘By the 1830s, despite still having the reputation of a smuggler’s resort, Sandy Bay began attracting enterprising, law-abiding free settlers. One of the greatest advantages of the river-side suburb was the clean water from its many little streams. The Hobart Town Rivulet was already a miasma of rotting carcasses and filth, spreading disease and death, and the merchants in Hobart Town saw the advantages in moving their families out of the township.’ (Goc, p. 87)

I came to a stretch of eroding yellow cliff and there again was a rivulet stifled by a tangle of exotic weeds and creepers, forming a dirty pool from which a mere trickle emerged and entered the river. It was only afterwards, when I was researching that I learned that this, for sure, was Cartwright Creek and that the pretty little cove just a short stroll south, sheltering in the elbow between this strip of shore and the sloping point, was the start of Cartwright Point. I had thought Cartwright Point was at Taroona High School and so, when I did the walk, I could not place this rivulet or the cove.

A little path descended beside it and I walked a short way up it and looked about – and came face to face, yet again, with my blindness to landscape. There was a park up there. And this modest rivulet had clearly enjoyed making itself a deep bed. This was precisely where the road curved and Taroona began.

I have driven along Sandy Bay Road a zillion times, thinking about a zillion different things but never about the green space on the downward slope of that bend in the road. The Truganini Reserve is on the other side – and in fact, it’s where Mount Nelson slopes down to the river at a fairly steep gradient because of the gully carved along its side by the rivulet. Had you asked me, I could not have told you that this park is the Pierce Reserve or that it follows the banks of Cartwright Creek, a rivulet that has its source on Mount Nelson, enjoys sunlight and moonshine all the way, except for where it passes under the span of the road. It would once have contributed delicacies from the mountain top to the river it was merging with. These days it’s shabby and sick. If it was our pet, we’d be up for animal cruelty charges. If it was our god, bad luck would rain down on us…

I made a note to self: find out more about this rivulet – and when I did, I was to discover that Mr George Cartwright, who along with his brother owned several farms on this shoreline and was ‘father of the Tasmanian bar’ was himself sometimes out of order, in front of it for striking fear into the hearts of his neighbours.

Birds yacht from Crawfords — The view from the Cartwright Point area. This yacht had kept pace with me for much of my walk.

Although I felt chastened by my ignorance, I also had a sense of anticipation because I thought I knew what lay around the corner of the point, but I was in no rush to get there. Cartwright Point is pretty and has the feeling of a private beach. It was nice to linger. I could not have been happier.

Looking back at the cove at Cartwright Point

I scrambled over boulders and requested right of way from a fallen eucalypt that lay across my path, and then I was on another beach, known but not known, grappling with another name, perhaps because Andrew Short and I viewed the beaches years apart and on different tides, perhaps because he numbers the beaches but doesn’t always mention them by name, perhaps because beaches can be tricksters… or maybe just because beaches are a human construct anyway.

Source:

Goc, N. 1997. Sandy Bay: a social history. Gentrx Publishing, Hobart.

Short, A.D. 2006. Beaches of the Tasmanian coast and islands. Sydney University Press, Sydney.

Derwent River: Blinking Billy to Hinsby Beach – Part 4

January 6, 2016

Sandy Bay’s wild side

A selection of photographs from Sandy Bay’s hidden shoreline.

Cement waterfall — Blinking Billy Beach 3. Disturbing structure

Once were steps — Steps to nowhere. Blinking Billy Beach 3 section

Another lonely boathouse — Another lonely boat shed

Detail with red brick — Detail, Blinking Billy Beach 3, southern end

Parties held long ago — Blinking Billy Beach 3

Blinking Billy 3 section old rails — On the Blinking Billy Beach 3 section

Rockpool — Over the pebbles, over the sand, back to the reefs

Private access, southern end of Blinking Billy Beach 3

Geology, Blinking Billy beach 3, southern point — Unconsolidated cliff. Blinking Billy beach 3, southern point

Blinking Billy 3 from the south — Looking back at Blinking Billy beach 3 section

Gulls and yacht — Near Mitah Crescent; yacht with the spinnaker

More steps — Before Mitah Crescent – structures on Blinking Billy Beach 3 southern end

View over my shoulder — Blinking Billy Beach 3

On the other side — Looking back at the beach shed and boulder at Mitah Crescent

Last Sandy Bay stretch pink deck — Mitah Crescent to Taroona section

South towards Taroona — After Mitah Crescent

Derwent River: Blinking Billy to Hinsby Beach – Part 3: To Mitah Crescent Cove

January 5, 2016

I Know You, Boulder

The walk continued…

At the end of the beach I had to hop onto rocks and make my way between the river and a concrete wall. Around the corner a wooden boatshed looked as though it might end my walk but I found a way around it and although my walk felt seamless this is where I regard the Blinking Billy Beach 3 section as beginning. Just look at this picture. Who’d think there was a city here?

Boatshed marking beginning of BB3 — As you turn the corner at the point at the southern end of Blinking Billy Beach 2 (aka Half Moon Bay) you see this structure.

The same subjects preoccupied me as I walked along – the geology, the history, the structures – and, specifically, locating myself on this piece of shoreline. I kept changing my mind as to where I was in relation to the road above me but I wanted to do this walk without the help of Google Maps so that I had a real sense of (urban) adventuring into the unknown.

Blinking Billy 3 wild coast — As you turn the corner at the point at the southern end of Blinking Billy Beach 2 (aka Half Moon Bay) you see this structure.

In wild weather this would be a windswept stretch of rocky coastline with views north to town, south into Storm Bay and across the river to more loveliness along the southern section of the eastern shore. On the day of my walk these lonely stretches felt pensive, secret and self-contained, and I felt myself more likely to encounter a nineteenth century smuggler along here than back at Red Chapel Beach or Blinking Billy Point. At the same time I felt as though the shoreline was as aware of me as I was of it.

I figured I was out of Geography Bay and this new perspective of the river renewed my feeling of exhilaration in the landscape and perplexity about ourselves – that we Westerners have been here since the beginning of the 1800s and yet, so close to the city centre, the nomenclature is still so sparse as to be mostly non-existent and so slippery where it is there at all. Many of us know more about London, Paris and places overseas than we do the intimate nooks and crannies of the river, the mountain and the great rifted catchment.

A few months after this walk I had a debate with a friend over just this issue. He’s a man that does real adventuring and exploring – the further off the beaten tracks of this world and out of communication the better. He is against nomenclature. He wants the earth’s places (mountains, rivers) left untainted by names but is prepared to compromise on a latitude/longitude co-ordinate.

I feel differently. As I walked along this stretch of coast wondering about the original aboriginal names for the places and features I was passing – names that over 30,000 years just have to have been rich, dense and redolent with mythology – it struck me like an epiphany, the extremely serious and overlooked disconnection we have with the earth. A shrieking Disconnection. A Disconnection so profound we’re trashing the planet beyond redemption and losing ourselves. No names – no recognition. No relationship. No honouring. No sense of gratitude. I looked at the magnificent, powerful river that I love so much, as much a goddess as the Ganges, and wished ‘sacred’ had not become a disparaged word because if anything felt sacred it was the animation I perceived in this river and its shoreline, so dynamic and timeless despite our culture turned beautiful parasite glued to its side. At the most profound level this existential disconnection is manifesting in more damaged psyches as each generation becomes less connected to the earth because how do you honour yourself if you can’t relate to and stand in awe of the greater entity you’re part of? As I wandered along the rocks, pausing to ponder their origins, diversity and beauty, I felt so utterly enthralled at the profligate beauty about me and a real grief that so many other compelling distractions have made it difficult for us to immerse ourselves in a landscape unfettered by human notions of time as was the case before our cultural evolution careered us away from hunting and gathering.

I had begun to pay more attention to my thoughts and less to the landscape when a sloping and strangely familiar boulder blocked my route.

About two feet of estuary rose and fell about its base. I didn’t want to take off my shoes and wade, the river’s temperature making it somewhat untouchable. On the other hand, my first strategy for climbing up the boulder’s side was hampered by the fact that a few weeks before I had dislocated and fractured my little finger while working on the boat with our mechanic, who I think of as being to engines what Leonard Cohen is to music.

I put my hands on the sloping rock. ‘I know you, Boulder.’ We had not met for a Very Long Time. Looking up I noticed a huge house with enormous windows. Now that was new to me.

When we were a whole lot younger we had come to look at a house – a beach shack really – at the bottom of Mitah Crescent. The owners walked us through their cacti and succulent garden down to a large boulder. The river lapped around its base but they assured us there was sand when the tide went out. We desired that boulder and that river access but knew that once we had paid for the property we would not be able to afford renovations for a while to come and so we sadly and stupidly decided not to make an offer.

I leaned my back against the boulder for a while, thinking that on this walk I’d barely noticed the Eastern Shore – I was so busy ‘paying attention’ (my current mantra) to the rocks about my feet and the all enveloping personality of the shore. My iPhone was losing power rapidly because of happy snapping and jubilant voice memos. I looked back along the way I’d come. I tested my finger’s capacity to help draw my weight up the side of the boulder. Not looking good.

Looking back from Mitah Crescent — Looking back at Blinking Billy Beach 3 from Mitah Crescent

My options were limited – I could fall, climbing that boulder. But if so, there was reason to hope that I’d be spotted sooner rather than later by the big windowed houses above me because at this point of the walk they had drawn closer and lower to the shore and so I took my chances, shifted my weight from disabled finger to used-to-being-bruised knee. Trying to be discrete, because I could not definitely recall whether the boulder was a right of way, I crept across it, slithered down over the boat shed’s jetty and found myself in an intimate and beautiful sandy cove. If the tide had been out when we’d viewed that house, we would both have lost our heads and hearts.

Cove at Mitah Crescent — Looking back at Mitah Crescent cove

More rocks, more pebbles, the occasional rivulet and astonishing discoveries. I sometimes thought that paying too much attention to where I was about to place my feet I was missing out on rivulets, but in fact the way you find a Hobart rivulet is to use your nose. As they emerge dishevelled and emaciated from their concrete prisons they bring with them a distinct smell: stale old detergent. Yep. The cleaner we are, the dirtier we make the environment.

Then I encountered another boulder and, with an awkward gap, a double set of rails leading from boat sheds to the water. I slithered down to the base of the boulder and timed my scramble for a gap in the waves – and made it under the structure.

I was about to leave Sandy Bay and enter the suburb of Taroona. but a little way around the next corner I found some more appealing structures and to my surprise, a sphinx like rock gazing out to sea. It’s waypoints like this that would undoubtedly have carried names earlier in the Holocene and I paused, feeling the loss of the language that once sung this landscape into being, the loss of a way of being in the landscape and interpreting the subtle nuances our less sophisticated gaze misses. I work with people who have dementia. In a more holistic way I think we have robbed the landscape of its earlier identity and a significant part of its memory.

Sphinx — As you turn the corner at the point at the southern end of Blinking Billy Beach 3 you see this structure. In the absence of official nomenclature, my personal name for it is The Mouheenener Sentinal

And it was along this stretch of shore that I nagging awareness came to the fore – one huge river, but only a handful of avian wanderers.

Where the hell were the birds?

Next blog entry: Photographs – Blinking Billy to the Sandy Bay border

Blinking Billy to Hinsby Beach – Part 2: Geography Bay Beaches

January 3, 2016

Into the Volcano

June, 2015

I woke with a huge sense of anticipation about this next walk, keen to get going, but the aroma of coffee filled the kitchen, scrambled eggs were on offer and the woodheater warmed the house. The flame robin in the garden seemed an auspicious omen and so I breakfasted at home in preference to stopping by a Long Beach cafe.

I saw yachts sailing before a light northerly breeze as I approached my starting point. The sky was a milky dome of cloud and the landscape was quiet and dreamy. It stayed that way all day and the mountain was hidden from view except for occasional glimpses of forested flank through small gaps in the clouds.

There were plovers on the beach and a lone cormorant fishing as I set off down the path from Long Beach and soon I was swinging around Blinking Billy Point into Geography Bay, the old lighthouse on my right pressed up against the houses, past the old search light and the Charles Darwin Cliffs and down on to Blinking Billy Beach, the small waves breaking on the pebbles and little sand evident because the winter river had drowned the beach.

I had not always known this was the case. I thought it’s disappearance indicated climate change, but the Salty Seadog had once told me it went submarine in winter. On rough, wintry days the beach makes music, the cobbles rolling in the waves. The Salty Seadog writes music and plays music so I guess it’s her kind of beach.

Blinking Billy Beach 1: the view from the north

I’d walked this coastline by the time I discovered Lena Lencek’s book The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth (2009) as an audio recording on Scribd, my new favourite app. She’d spent her childhood in Trieste, enjoying the Adriatic coast and then her family moved to the USA and she got to know vastly different kinds of beaches. Listening to this book at night, speakers in my ears, I learned about pocket beaches, and the landscape I was walking fell into place.

A pocket beach is normally a fairly thin, crescent shaped beach nestled between rocky headlands. It’s possible to find strings of them along coastlines – beach, headland, beach – and although they are sedimentary (the sand, shell and pebbles laid down in beautiful layers by water) the headlands, and the rocky platforms at their feet, isolate the beaches from each other, and that means they can be subjected to different types of beach making and breaking processes, like the angle of waves and higher tides in winter which often cause them to disappear. (And if, like me, you’d forgotten that tides are higher in winter, it’s because the sun, like the moon, has an influence on tides and in winter we’re tilted further away from the sun and so it’s gravitational pull is much slacker and the tides aren’t drawn back quite as much.)

I was so excited by this concept of pocket beaches that I just had to enlighten the geologist. ‘I’m sure Blinking Billy is a pocket beach,’ I enthused.

He looked at me bemused. ‘We’re surrounded by pocket beaches,’ he said. ‘There are heaps of pocket beaches along the Derwent. Name any one. Chances are it’s a pocket beach.’ And thus began a second lesson in all things pocket beach and Derwent River. I listened, but at the same time I was hatching a plan to subvert the concept – each beach in my pocket. I ordered vials off Etsi and began to gather each beach’s signature, it’s fingerprint in these tiny bottles. Because this is the thing – the sand on each beach is different and after all, one day these beaches will really drown.

It’s a short walk from one end of the first Blinking Billy beach to the other but a little longer when the sand is submerged and you’re walking on cobbles. At the far end I made a voice memo: ‘I’m about to go where I have never been before’. That was because I’ve always been here with dogs, and I’ve always stopped obediently at the sign commanding no dogs to go any further because of seabird habitat.

Blinking Billy Beach 1: view from the south

I may never have been here but I knew that Darwin had. He’d sailed into Hobart on the Beagle in 1836 and been pretty unimpressed with the town initially but this changed as walked about. He headed up the mountain, guided by the Sandy Bay Rivulet (my first recorded walk), he walked along the river’s eastern shore where I’m currently spending a bit of time and he walked this coastline too. I felt he was a suitable companion in spirit because he had the observant eye I lack and was able to make sense of the Derwent’s complex geology in a way I could not. He’d named kunanyi/Mt Wellington Table Mountain, after another mountain I have lived beneath and his grandfather Erasmus and my sister both made Lichfield their home. If he was up for a little idle chatter, conversation should flow. And there were moments on this walk when the landscape felt so timeless I felt I could well have encountered him contemplating pebbles and stones on some of the wilder sections.

Such was his observant eye that on his fifth day here he found volcanic rocks near Blinking Billy Point on his walk from Battery Point to Sandy Bay and realized that the cliff revealed two lava flows and that volcanic rocks lay strewn about. ‘Hah!’ was his reaction (or something like this). ‘I’m standing in the eroded heart of an ancient volcano!’ He figured this out way back then yet many locals are unaware of this even today.

I’d stumbled into the heart of the volcano often and unknowingly, oblivious to the story the Charles Darwin cliffs were telling, more concerned about the smelly water that seems to be deposited straight onto the concrete path from a house above the cliffs and so the fact that Hobart is situated on the remnants of a volcano was news to me when, after this walk, I tried to make sense of it all. The reef extending out to the John Garrow Light is an old lava flow and fault lines abound through this area.

I rounded the point at the end of the beach. There, before my eyes, was another beach – Blinking Billy Beach 2, according to Short or Half Moon Bay, according to Leaman (1999). In the distance, a man in a red jumper was throwing sticks for his dog. I navigated a bit more reef and cobbles then stepped on to the sand.

The reef between Blinking Billy Beaches 1 & 2 (aka Half Moon Bay)

A cockatoo flew overhead, yelling for its mob. And then again more pebbles and then another sandy stretch and another six private stairways down onto the beach. I noticed a rivulet. This is poor little Folder Rivulet, according to Andrew Short, emerging out of its drain into sunlight, unloved and disregarded, too tiny to matter. (I watched this little rivulet being bulldozed unceremoniously into its drain, back in the day. It looked so wrong it hurt. And recently I returned to its valley to try to discover how much of it can still be seen above ground. Not much.) We communed, the rivulet and I, and then I took photos of beautiful conglomerate rocks and and made another voice memo:

I’m on another sandy cove with some interesting old beach structures. It’s quite a long sandy cove with a rocky reef in the centre of it. As I walked along the second stretch of sand a white speed boat came up river and the yacht I’d thought was leading the race (they rounded the buoy at Nutgrove all bunched up) has proceeded on down the river with its spinnaker up… this is such a lovely walk.’

And it was true; I felt elated, thrown back into childhood recollections of The Famous Five and their explorations which we tried to mimic on holidays on South Africa’s eastern seaboard. I felt invigorated by a sense of adventure and discovery and on this beach there were so many new discoveries – new perspectives of the river and tiny, exquisite details.

Here’s the southern end of the beach, and the man and the dog had already disappeared around the corner.

The reef at this end of the beach held my attention for quite some time. The rocks were interesting, human debris, although depressing, also managed to look artistic and I began to do a little bit of amateur geological sleuthing perplexed by rocks that didn’t always seem to belong together – sedimentary, conglomerate and igneous, worn red bricks, smashed and violently weathered rock, unconsolidated slopes, conglomerates of modern material – and delicate combinations of life forms were represented here or lay ahead of me.

When I reached the next point there was a yellow unconsolidated cliff, a wall someone had built beneath it, and a rosy coloured boulder near an intrusion.

I was seriously losing track of where I was in relation to Blinking Billy beach numbers as devised by Andrew Short (see The Book Shelf) and I hadn’t got very far at all. I was lost in thoughts to do with defining beaches – how much sand do you need before you have a cove? How much before you have a beach? Were the long stretches of boulders and pebbles actually beaches at all or just the bits in between?

And did it even matter where beaches began and ended scientifically, subjectively or according to the whimsy of the tides when I was engrossed in the landscape, entranced by the huge views and fabulous details – utterly blown away by the wild grandeur so totally divorced, below the cliffs from the houses in some other more banal, irrelevant world up top?

This coastline is divine but also tragic because it’s along here that the mouheenener once walked with confidence, and after their lands had been taken that traumatised families would have retreated.

To be continued…

Sources:

Leaman, David. 1999. Walk into history in Southern Tasmania. Lehman Geophysics, Hobart

Royal Society of Tasmania, Charles Darwin in Hobart Town, edited by Margaret Davies, Hobart, Royal Society of Tasmania, 2009.

Derwent River: Blinking Billy to Hinsby Beach – Part 1

December 26, 2015

The Word From the Foredeck

I’ve had lots of opportunities to observe the coastline between Blinking Billy Point and the Alum Cliffs. It’s a scenic kayak trip from Short Beach to Kingston and when there’s barely a ripple on the water it’s lovely to idle in time and on tide and simply float a while, mind empty, just lost in the beauty of the estuary and its shoreline. A cormorant dives, a fish jumps and occasionally a beetle on its back, its legs flailing disconsolately, might require rescuing.

The breeze is my friend if I’m sailing but I’m less keen on it when I’m bashing into white caps when kayaking – although surfing waves with a following wind (always more gentle) is a lot of fun. The Derwent’s water is cold and I know my limitations; it would snap freeze me if I fell in and hopping back into a sea kayak after a capsize is not easy at all. When the wind strengthens I’m ready to head for the closest beach. My focus contracts to the wind and the waves and the shoreline barely gets a second glance.

The landmarks I pick as waypoints when I’m sailing or kayaking are known features and this is what I was remarking on to my friend as we sailed home one day after a weekend down the channel. The skipper wasn’t calling for a sail change. The mains’l didn’t need tweaking and so we were chatting about the Taroona-Sandy Bay coastline we were sailing past. There were the cliffs topped by houses. There was an occasional set of steps, a sundeck or a boatshed but mostly it was sombre rock and remnant forest higher up and I couldn’t have named any spots along there. My friend didn’t exactly agree with me about the shoreline’s inaccessibility though.

‘It’s not really,’ she said. ‘If the tide is right you can walk it. In fact, you should. It’s worth it.’

‘You should, it’s worth it,’ I was to discover, was an enormous understatement but for a long time I did nothing with this information. It was only once I’d decided to write this blog and to include the river that I acted.

I went to Taroona and I explored the roads closest to the shore looking for access points to the river. I’d like to say I studied the chart and the maps but I didn’t. I looked at them in the most cursory fashion and they never made it into my backpack. But one Friday night before going to bed I did pick up the tide table. I wanted the moon and sun to be in alignment for a very low tide – ideally a Proxigean spring tide. There would be supermoons in August and September but this was June and I didn’t want to wait that long. Hobart doesn’t have a big tidal range – the maximum is 1.32m but on a narrow, rocky coastline that’s still significant.

To see what the tides might be on any particular day I’ve always done it the easy way – just clicked on the tide app on my phone and so I wasn’t too sure I was interpreting the paper tide table across the year correctly, particularly as it seemed to me that the next day looked like it would be pretty damned good regardless of the lack of a spring tide. It was June and actually, it was quite close to the winter solstice. If I’d known more about beaches at the time I would have known that winter isn’t actually the best time to find the beaches all stretched out but at that point I hadn’t encountered Lena Lencek and she had a few things to tell me that the geologist had not.

And so I set the alarm for Very Early, pretty excited about this walk. It was either going to be stunning or it was going to end with me against a cliff, the dark water rising.

Derwent River: Marieville Esplanade (South)

December 22, 2015

Still Just Hanging In

Sometimes you just don’t see what’s in front of your eyes.

The cardboard sign at the start of the track gave me pause for thought ‘Snake Spotted Lying on the Path’ someone had written, and so instead of exploring new territory I headed down to the marina to do a bit of work on Samos. The dogs lay and watched me. It’s currently the summer solstice, the day was hot, the moon a waxing gibbous and the tide low but oblivious to all this I was tending the engine and talking to my neighbour.

At a certain point I looked past the yachts and ducks to the houses that occupy the foreshore.

There at their base were remnants of beach. Rather sorry looking remnants but large enough patches of polluted sand to provide private coves for those lucky enough to live in those houses. Not that long ago it was a longer stretch of cleaner sand and boats swung at their moorings in the lee of Wrest Point. Now the marina’s been extended and there are new floating berths.

This view has become so familiar to me but in failing to question it I hadn’t seen it for what it really was: a beach still present enough to make a statement: well may I go unnoticed but I’ll be back in one guise or another long after the marina and these activities are gone.

Derwent River: Blinking Billy Point

December 18, 2015

The Geography of Nervous Twitches

There’s a concrete path that curves around the southern edge of Long Beach and leads out past Blinking Billy Point to Blinking Billy Beach. When the South Westerly is churning up white caps on the river this path is sheltered and has a great view north across Long Beach and down to the bridge but once you step from the behind the shelter of the hill the wind is out to get you and its Antarctic breath can cause your eyes to stream.

Conversely, when the tide is high and waves are being hurried into the bay by an exuberant North Easterly, you may find yourself attacked by an encroaching wave and forced to turn back. Mostly, though, it’s a sunny light hearted sort of stroll, long enough to sniff the breeze but too short to regard as exercise.

Looking north on the walk to Blinking Billy Point — The view north on the path to Blinking Billy Point

A friend had told me there was a Sandy Bay beach where dogs were welcome any time of day but her description was vague and I had struggled to find it. Then one day, coming back up river after a weekend of sailing in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel I noticed two labradors with their people on a stretch of sand I hadn’t paid attention to before, and recognition dawned. It’s now become a favourite walk when the dogs are keen to go adventuring and I can’t quite match their enthusiasm, or I want to catch up with a friend for a coffee and treat them too.

As with most of this coast, Blinking Billy Point has changed names like people change clothes. It used to be called One Tree Point until (I’m supposing) that lone tree was no more. It was also once called Garth’s Point.

The Garth’s came here from Norfolk Island with seven children in tow and made a quick segue from the merest of shelters to owners of two land grants, the one encompassing the point and the land uphill through what’s now the Alexander Battery Reserve, and the other spread across Porter Hill.

The Garth’s were farmers by day and smugglers by night. The submerged reef below the point was called Garth’s Bank and served two purposes: fishing and smugglers’ lookout. Further uphill on their smaller Porter Hill grant, they built their smugglers’ hut and it lasted until a fire burned it down in 1978. Devon and Cornwall can move over, I think, because Tassie has a rich smuggling history too.

One fine day when we were idling past the point on a light breeze someone mentioned that long ago William Watchorn, harbour master, a man with nervous eyes, lived on the point. He lobbied for a light and he got it. Both the point and the light assumed his nickname: Blinking Billy. The light still stands and while its gaze was fixed and unblinking in its time, it works no longer and is disregarded by river traffic.

This light was rendered useless by the John Garrow Light, a navigational structure, cormorant hang out and sometime racing mark, that took its place offshore on Garth reef. For some obscure reason this light is named after a pastry chef who lived in Bath Street (Battery Point) and the pastry chef’s name was extended to Garth reef as well. It’s now known as the John Garrow shoal.

For a low, unassuming point, Blinking Billy Point carries a wealth of history and interesting buildings. Along with the navigation light there is the remains of the searchlight emplacement. Two spotlights, precursors to the Dark Mofo lights, but focussed on defence not entertainment, lit up the sky from 1890 to WWII, playing their role as part of the the Derwent Defence Network, which included, in this vicinity, the Alexandra Battery further up the hill and the artillery at Fort Nelson.

There’s also an old part of the city’s sewage system – a small blue pumphouse which was built in 1919 and is deceptively pretty.

People still cast a line over the smugglers’ reef on fine days, but those of us who sail know only too well the river’s violent mood swings and I’ve seen kayakers caught out here, just metres off the pointt, overturned and struggling to reach the shore.

Sources:

Nautical News: the newsletter of the Maritime Museum Association of Tasmania. Winter edition, 2002.

Goc, N. 1997. Sandy Bay: a social history, Gentrx Publishing, Hobart.