Sounds in the Silence

Away from our beloved Mountains for a week, we couldn't resist the chance to regain some altitude, and drove to the top of Mount Vincent, one of the highest points between Coopernook and Lansdowne, north of the Manning River.  It was an interesting drive, often at little more than walking pace, through damp gullies and up steep, rocky ridges - always surrounded by soaring tree trunks.

We did so because my wife's mum and aunts had told many fond tales of their childhood days at Langley Vale, a village now vanished, that once thrived near the Langley Bros Timber Mill, on the Lansdowne River.  The men of the family had worked at the mill, or cut timber for it, and the children had walked for miles across neighbouring farms and followed the old Langley Vale Tramway up through the forested gullies and ridges to picnic on the rocky heights of Mt Vincent.

The first thing that struck us was the view.  Vast sweeps of farmland and forested ridges, cut through by slow winding rivers, spread out to the south and near west.  Further out to the west, mountain ranges framed the sky, while north west soared the jagged remnants of old volcanoes, now clothed in temperate rain forest.  Even northeast, the ocean view was partially obscured by a sudden mountain. 

Distant towns, and the city of Taree were tiny specks in the vista, and a long white line of surf marked the edge of Australia and the beginning of the Pacific Ocean.

The second, notable thing was not the silence, but the sounds we could hear coming to us from miles away - cows bellowing in paddocks half a kilometre below and several kms away - the siren of an ambulance - first heard while it was still ten kms away, drawing nearer until it stopped somewhere in the village of Lansdowne.  A dog barked, and we looked down to see a tiny black speck, far below, helping its master muster cattle.

Though we live in the middle of the Blue Mountains National Park, in one of the little towns threaded like shiny beads along the Great Western Highway, and thus imagine we are in a quiet place, the silence further out, away from the surf-like roar of highways and main roads, and the accumulated hum and grumble of myriad airconditioners, mowers, cars, stereos, and businesses, is at a different order of magnitude.

Most humans now live in an ocean of sound unlike anything that has existed for most of the history of the human race - back in the village, sitting in the sun on the front verandah of the aunt's house, I was privy to every conversation in houses a hundred metres away, to the half-cocked first crowing of a young rooster on another block, the distant conversation of cattle and farm dogs, and the many birds that patrolled the yards and gardens in their constant search for food, shelter, and company.

 Silence can seem a distant memory if too many of these guys are about, though.

That I could hear  all these things so clearly (despite old ears battered by decades of violent noises and now awash in the cricket like tones of tinnitus) is testament to the amount of noise we now inflict upon ourselves and the world around us.

We adapt to the background noise after a while, just as our noses adapt to ambient smells, and our eyes to the light available.  Yet even as we adjust our perceptions, and filter out the input our brain classifies as least important, we are still buffetted by it - often to the point of significant physical and psychological stress. 

So, when you feel the need to wander among the trees, or to sit on a rock and listen to the water tumbling downstream, or to luxuriate in the crackling warmth of a campfire, far from the hustle and bustle, perhaps you are not, as some would have it, being self indulgent.  At some deeper level, you are seeking what you need for the sake of your own wellbeing.

Among the Trees

Inga Simpson has, with her latest work A Life with Trees, given us a poignant story of the constant tension between the dreams and desires we humans try to impose on "our" land, and the drives and needs of the manifold occupants - plant and animal - that were in and on that land before us, or that have arrived from elsewhere to enjoy the side-effects our decisions and actions have wrought upon that land.

Within its pages there is a resonance with my own life amid tree and pasture, and the attachment I formed to the landscapes within which I lived, and, at times, made my living.  Like her, I have moved more than once, and cleared and planted, trying to add my dreams and desires to the existing ecology, and like her I have had to compromise between dreams and the counter forces of nature and economics.

I have been enchanted by the grandeur of a place, and by the miniscule wonder and beauty that reveal themselves to the quiet traveller or sojourner.  The first view of any landscape, large or small, always contains more than the observer can take in.  We think we see it all, but our brain, as it usually does when confronted with large amounts of information via the senses, filters and simplifies - bringing to our consciousness the "big picture" first, and then the more easily identifiable aspects, with an emphasis on things about which we already have some knowledge.

Another view, in different light, weather, or season, and different aspects are highlighted - the big picture changes shape and gains texture.  Finer details begin to come to our notice, until we make that all too common mistake and think we know all about the place, and fully understand it.

Then the light changes again, or the temperature, or rain falls, or fails to fall when expected - and the view changes again as we notice previously overlooked details.  Carefuly nurtured plants die of drought, drowning, or unseen disease, while self-sown seedlings that weren't obvious only weeks before are suddenly flourishing.  Perhaps they were there all along, rendered invisible by our ignorance, or even misidentified as weeds.

Mature trees that somehow escaped notice for years, even as we lamented the absence of that species, appear under our nose (or over our heads), and supposedly rare and endangered ground orchids suddenly, and briefly, carpet a ridge top in flowers - no matter how long we dwell in a place, it can always surprise us.  And so we add to our knowledge of place, and as the surprise fades, we again grow smug about our understanding - until the next new discovery.

The store of knowledge contained in Indigenous lore is astounding, but should not surprise - there have been many millenia of gathering knowledge, arranging it, piecing it together, and passing it on for future generations.  The Australian First Peoples have been living with this place for so long that they have seen it change as the most recent glaciation cooled the planet and lowered the oceans, and they have seen it change back as the planet warmed.

They have seen old homes and fishing spots drowned by the rising oceans, and adapted as deserts grew, and forests moved and changed - all the while adding their observations and understanding to the songs that hold their memory.  Now they are seeing it change again, as human technological ability and desire for dominance once more overtakes human understanding and ethics.

A lifetime cannot be enough for a complete understanding of a place, an ecology - be it a forest, as in Inga's case, or a shore, or a marsh.  When trees can live for centuries, even passing a millenia or more in the sun and the wind, how can one person ever fully understand a forest?  But that person can live in the forest, and learn its rhythms, and love it -though those people who choose such a path are ever more often finding themselves at odds with that other branch of humanity, who, for whatever reason, see in a forest only a short term picture comprised of dollar gains and dollar costs.

Humans are creatures of story, and it is story-tellers like Inga who help people see the view that they may not previously have noticed - to see the intricate, essential to all of us, life that, without such seeing, they could too easily trample underfoot, or consign to the blade of the bulldozer or the teeth of the chainsaw.

Understory tells of that tension between the needs imposed by "economics" and "society", and the needs of life itself - the constantly growing, moving web that makes our world liveable and beautiful, and without which no amount of money or economic growth would be of any use to the human race at all.  It is a story that has been told in other forms, about other places, by so many people - it needs constant re-telling, for all our sakes.