Cloudy, autumn, Blue Mountain dawns are, in our front yard, a melange of almost every green on the pallette, leavened by the dull greys and browns of bark and twig, and one brief glimpse of the white house beyond the creek, on the other side the little valley. Later, the sun will push through even thick cloud and pick out the late roses, and second blooming of the rosemary, but, for now, the shadows and muted colours allow easy concealement for both the hunter and the hunted.
As I stood at the top of the steps, assessing what level of clothing would be adequate for a walk to the village, an anomalous fleck of brightness jiggled into view at ground level. Brillliant white, bobbing up and down, crossing the grass (not lawn, it hasn't been mowed for a while, and is only kept in check by the tyres of family who are staying for a while) towards me.
Changing focus from sky to earth, I find our resident Black Ducks waddling towards me. One has picked up a fallen Cockatoo feather - small, squarish, and ever so white - and is waving it at me while its mate mutters quietly about their need for breakfast. The feather is dropped in the rush, the moment I toss a few little scraps of (wholemeal) bread onto the grass.
How long do these birds live? I've looked up a variety of sites and reference works and so far haven't been able to find an answer. We met them first, eleven and a half years ago, soon after we arrived at our new home in the Valley on top of the Mountain. I had walked to the letterbox and was standing there, checking the mail, when a soft, repetitive mutter intruded on my reading. A duck was standing a few feet behind me, looking up, addressing me in his own language. I don't know where he was while I crossed the yard - there was no flutter of wings to say he had flown in from the creek, so I must have walked past him. I could hear my grandfather's voice, decades ago..
"Lucky it wasn't a Brown Snake, lad, it would'a got you" It was a reminder to look about while I walked - what else had I missed?
He followed me back to the house, so I took the hint and threw some bread onto the lawn - he had made it clear he wasn't leaving the verandah otherwise. A day or two later, he was back - with a friend. Not long after that, we were introduced to seven fluffy ducklings. I am guessing that the previous residents had been feeding them, and, despite the house having been empty for some months, they hadn't forgotten what might be possible, if the right questions were asked.
Similarly, it didn't take long for our Magpie Landlords to arrive and let us know what rent would be acceptable to them - and the King Parrot that landed on my shoulder with no warning was another sign of my place in the order of things. Our new beginning in the mountains was, in the lives of the feathered locals, a continuation - a new, if similar, chapter in a longer story. Those birds had been dealing with humans for a long time, and not only the owners of this house. Our Magpie friends had a cafe-crawl that included several other houses along our street, as well as the butcher in the village on the other side of the railway line.
Before we had met many of the local humans, the birds were already greeting us and letting us know where we stood in their world. It is a world that their ancestors occupyied and shared with humans for a very, very long time. Only thirty years ago, or forty at the most, this ground was a swamp full of paperbark trees and reeds, frogs and snakes - do these ducks remember those times? They would have raised many ducklings in such a place.
The Cockatoos would remember - they are said to live seventy years, perhaps more, and the more I see of them, the easier it is to believe that they have a language, culture, and an oral history. That would mean it is only just over three and a half Cockatoo lifetimes since Governor Phillip set his convicts and marines to work on the shores of Port Jackson.
It could be as much as a thousand Cockatoo lifetimes since the ancestors of the Gundungurra people first drank from the stream that flows past our garden. I wonder what stories the Cockatoos have been able to tell each other about this land, and the changes that various people have wrought upon it, even as the ice ebbed and flowed, and the oceans rose and fell.
All who came before us left their marks, and created ripples that reach across time and space to affect the here and now. Ripples seem tiny things, but when enough arrive at a conjunction, a wave can rise, and break - it can freshen a pond, or crash upon a shore and uproot what was standing.
Have you wondered, as you paddle your canoe down the stormier reaches of the river of life, which choices of your own have put you where you are? Most of us do - yet there are waves in that maelstrom that grew from the ripples of the decisions of others, made in other times and places, near and far, just as the ripples of our own making have gone far from our sight, to shores we may never see. One wave might threaten to pull us under - another might wash us onto a welcoming shore - the voyage, one way or the other, is sure to be interesting.
I stood, mattock in one hand on this sunny morning, and contemplated my vegetable garden. I looked at the waves of pumpkin leaves and froth of summer grass seed heads that were breaking across my once tidy beds, and remembered the source of some of the ripples that led to this verdant tempest. Hurrying onto rain-soaked steps while wearing old, smooth-soled shoes was one splash that is still making itself felt - one moment of carelessness, followed by months of consequences. I can still only weild the mattock one handed, so it is going to take time to get the gardens back where I want them. The winter frosts will probably do more clearing and weeding than me.
Still, it could be worse - we escaped the fire season that was anticipated for The Mountains, unlike so many other parts of Australia (shhhh! I know - it is only the beginning of March - there is still April to go yet)
