| By Lucinda Bain In truth, the kind of life I lead with a houseful of young children can easily become monotonous. But at least once a year our domestic routine is interrupted by packing lists, camp gear and late night batch cooking and we find ourselves - my husband, three daughters and I – facing into the wind on the crisp shores of Norman Bay, our long shadows reaching into the earth, the oceanic air washing us clean of suburban tedium. After a long drive, countless are-we-there-yets, and with laundry baskets full of woollen jumpers, books, ground coffee, pasta, small canisters of soap and myriad other effects, we are at the Prom. It’s hard to imagine this place is always here, existing in parallel to our daily reality. When my mother was 12, in the late 1960s, her family started holidaying at the Prom, Yiruk Wamoon. Black and white photographs in sticky old albums reveal three weather beaten children – Mum and her two siblings – on walking tracks all over the Prom, often sulking, particularly as the children in the photos become teenagers. With paper bags full of homemade scroggin (don’t forget the chopped apricots, Mum likes to remind me) and only occasionally wearing hats, they would hike with my grandfather while my grandmother tidied and swept their canvas tent and, no doubt, sat down with a book and a cup of billy tea or perhaps a sneaky white from the flagon. Upon hearing our familial stories I used to wonder why my grandmother often chose to stay back at the campsite and miss the beauty of a hike. Now as a mother myself, opting to stay back to get dinner ready or tidy the tent, I know the reasons intimately. |  Eltham writer Lucinda Bain has won the 2022 Bass Coast Prize for Non-Fiction with The Prom, her personal interrogation of the writer’s place in nature in the midst of a climate emergency. The judges said of The Prom: “Lyrical writing, tying past, present and future: the acknowledgement of the past, the fear and beauty of the present, the ever-diminishing hope for the future. It feels slightly bleak, yet ends on a hopeful, simple (yet profound) fact … “Fantastic interrogation of the complexities of living under a constant and imminent existential threat in the context of privileged albeit sometimes mundane modern living.” |
My daughters, the elder two on the cusp of being teenagers themselves, are the fourth generation of Prom goers in our family. Each trip, with the existential overlay of climate science drenching my news feeds, I note the changing landscape and sense the delicate nature of this extraordinary ecosystem. Whether it be vegetation stripped clean by a recent storm, sea spurge swamping the track at Squeaky Beach, the naked, modest look of overexposed dunes, or dense clumps of invasive coast tea tree edging towards the road, the slow yet persistent tipping of the natural balance of things can be witnessed, if you look closely enough. How will it have changed by the time they are grown?
*
During summer this year we spent two weeks at the Prom. The landscape at that time is sprinkled with the decay of spring’s wildflowers: coast daisies, white kunzea, brittle billy buttons and tiny coral coloured flowers shaped like stars. A few weeks before we arrived I received an email saying that a little girl was hit by a car in the park and died. I strap my daughters’ helmets on their heads as they push off, pedalling around the dusty block while I make dinner at the campsite. I busy myself wiping the table and cutting carrots in the minutes they are gone. This small act feels like one of the many phases in motherhood where I’m asked to let go, just one metaphorical inch. I don’t find it easy. From the tiny particulars of motherhood, like the mild unease felt when my girls go riding around the block without me (will they hurt themselves?) through to phenomenal global issues, like war and climate change (will they suffer?) the future feels more uncertain than it did when I was a child, which to me, is a source of great discomfort. I clutch at the dishcloth, holding tightly to the minutiae. The girls return, giggling loudly, throwing their helmets into a tub next to the tent before occupying themselves inspecting twigs and leaves from the ground. Their feet are coated in a thin layer of pale dirt, the air is warm and they are happy. It is here at the Prom, in all its aliveness, vitality and memories, that we find solace.
Sitting around our campsite on 34th Avenue, with dusk delicately lacing the sky, I check the news on my phone: an election is looming. Within an algorithm closely attuned to my locality, age and interests, headline after headline exposes the imminent and varying threats of human-induced climate change: extreme weather events, food scarcity, ecosystem collapse. I hear of more and more young people who decide not to have children, and can’t possibly explain our decision to have three. As if to justify this choice I read and read, listening to and trying to learn the basic science behind the catastrophic changes in our climate, and predictions for what different elements mean for my daughters’ future. Their existence fuels me, and I wonder if I would have such a keen interest if it weren’t for having skin in the game.
In climate fiction: The Glad Shout, Migrations, Clade, I find stories of fires, floods and the decline of species that, within just the last five years, no longer feel far-fetched. In nonfiction and poetry the truth hits harder: Signs and Wonders, Earth Dwellers, and Fathoms: The World in the Whale, among others, document the impacts of the climate crisis in intimate detail. People and organisations I respect share information online about how to vote for climate action alongside confronting links about unimaginable temperatures in Antarctica and how to foster emotional courage in this age. I don’t know what to do with this growing sense of unease. I’m not a climate scientist or an activist. I’m just a Mum, I think.
I wake in the liminal hours and go outside. People are asleep, I can hear nothing but the ocean and the wind and for all intents and purposes I could be the only human here. The sky is draped with a shimmering blanket of stars, their iridescence causing the tussock grasses to glow in the dark. Even my pale hands glow. The bush around the campsite is starlit with constellations of bunny tails and buttercups, their buds quivering in the cool silvery breeze. Creatures rummage in the undergrowth. I sit in my chair for a moment, long enough to see a wombat and her joey shuffling through the campsite. At the sudden sight of me, the joey tumbles towards its mother in fright and they amble off together through the coastal scrub. The mother’s desire to care for her joey is innate, biological.
The rhythm of my thoughts drops an octave in these midnight hours at the Prom, swooping through the she-oaks as their seaweed-like fronds dance, slowing to the speed of the granite rocks, steady and thrumming with millions of years of grounded observation. My bones feel the beat of summer’s cicada song alongside the humming jingle of the cosmos raining down stardust on clear Prom nights, a cadence near impossible to reach in the suburbs. I note the gentle bend and exquisite brightness of the Milky Way and feel cocooned, as though being held in a glittering safety net.
Sitting around our campsite on 34th Avenue, with dusk delicately lacing the sky, I check the news on my phone: an election is looming. Within an algorithm closely attuned to my locality, age and interests, headline after headline exposes the imminent and varying threats of human-induced climate change: extreme weather events, food scarcity, ecosystem collapse. I hear of more and more young people who decide not to have children, and can’t possibly explain our decision to have three. As if to justify this choice I read and read, listening to and trying to learn the basic science behind the catastrophic changes in our climate, and predictions for what different elements mean for my daughters’ future. Their existence fuels me, and I wonder if I would have such a keen interest if it weren’t for having skin in the game.
In climate fiction: The Glad Shout, Migrations, Clade, I find stories of fires, floods and the decline of species that, within just the last five years, no longer feel far-fetched. In nonfiction and poetry the truth hits harder: Signs and Wonders, Earth Dwellers, and Fathoms: The World in the Whale, among others, document the impacts of the climate crisis in intimate detail. People and organisations I respect share information online about how to vote for climate action alongside confronting links about unimaginable temperatures in Antarctica and how to foster emotional courage in this age. I don’t know what to do with this growing sense of unease. I’m not a climate scientist or an activist. I’m just a Mum, I think.
I wake in the liminal hours and go outside. People are asleep, I can hear nothing but the ocean and the wind and for all intents and purposes I could be the only human here. The sky is draped with a shimmering blanket of stars, their iridescence causing the tussock grasses to glow in the dark. Even my pale hands glow. The bush around the campsite is starlit with constellations of bunny tails and buttercups, their buds quivering in the cool silvery breeze. Creatures rummage in the undergrowth. I sit in my chair for a moment, long enough to see a wombat and her joey shuffling through the campsite. At the sudden sight of me, the joey tumbles towards its mother in fright and they amble off together through the coastal scrub. The mother’s desire to care for her joey is innate, biological.
The rhythm of my thoughts drops an octave in these midnight hours at the Prom, swooping through the she-oaks as their seaweed-like fronds dance, slowing to the speed of the granite rocks, steady and thrumming with millions of years of grounded observation. My bones feel the beat of summer’s cicada song alongside the humming jingle of the cosmos raining down stardust on clear Prom nights, a cadence near impossible to reach in the suburbs. I note the gentle bend and exquisite brightness of the Milky Way and feel cocooned, as though being held in a glittering safety net.
*
In following the increasingly urgent climate change narrative, I struggle against my own complacency. It is easy to hold these disaster scenarios – rising sea levels, heat waves, species loss – at arms length from the dichotomy of my domestic life and takes effort to maintain engagement in scientific dialogue that is often beyond my realm of understanding. But here, in this profoundly treasured place with my family, the reality of what we might lose feels urgent.
From the early 1890s various disputes regarding the use of the promontory ensued, during which time the Prom was saved from ongoing subdivision and sale, eventually becoming a national park in 1908. From what I read, it appears this was largely due to persistent campaigning by the Field Naturalist Club of Victoria, a fight that lasted two decades and was not without challenge. Group members cared enough about the Prom to want to preserve it, albeit through a colonist lens. Nevertheless, it is here now: a living, breathing landscape supporting a highly diverse cross section of biodiversity. There are warm temperate and cool temperate rainforests, tall open forests, dry forests and woodlands, wetlands, heathlands, swamps and coastal habitats. According to Parks Victoria, more than 20 per cent of Victoria’s native plant species and half of its bird species are found here in the national park. Amongst the things I pack up each evening around the site are my daughters’ drawings of Whale Rock and Prom wildflowers: their pictures a little window into their thoughts and perspectives. I trace my finger along a curve of sketched rock in my daughter’s drawing and wonder if it is as dramatic as it sounds: climate crisis, climate emergency. It’s hard to conceptualise, but with so much at stake and the tenacity of past environmentalists behind me, I feel I have to keep trying.
From the early 1890s various disputes regarding the use of the promontory ensued, during which time the Prom was saved from ongoing subdivision and sale, eventually becoming a national park in 1908. From what I read, it appears this was largely due to persistent campaigning by the Field Naturalist Club of Victoria, a fight that lasted two decades and was not without challenge. Group members cared enough about the Prom to want to preserve it, albeit through a colonist lens. Nevertheless, it is here now: a living, breathing landscape supporting a highly diverse cross section of biodiversity. There are warm temperate and cool temperate rainforests, tall open forests, dry forests and woodlands, wetlands, heathlands, swamps and coastal habitats. According to Parks Victoria, more than 20 per cent of Victoria’s native plant species and half of its bird species are found here in the national park. Amongst the things I pack up each evening around the site are my daughters’ drawings of Whale Rock and Prom wildflowers: their pictures a little window into their thoughts and perspectives. I trace my finger along a curve of sketched rock in my daughter’s drawing and wonder if it is as dramatic as it sounds: climate crisis, climate emergency. It’s hard to conceptualise, but with so much at stake and the tenacity of past environmentalists behind me, I feel I have to keep trying.
*
In the optimistic light of morning under a cloudless sky I make cheese and vegemite sandwiches to take on a short walk. I place the cut triangles back into the plastic bread bag, a gesture reminiscent of my own mother and beach trips of my childhood. We park off Five Mile Road and walk with the girls through undulating banksia and stringybark woodlands to Millers Landing, home to the southernmost stand of mangroves in the world. We see no one, but an incessant feeling of being watched is felt and noted by my children, who become edgy. Away from the human overlay of Tidal River, the northern wilderness of the Prom has a charge in the air. Boulders, wallabies, and iconic grasstrees swishing their skirts. We have to lure the girls with promises of rainbow paddlepops on return to camp. At Millers Landing the wind lashes around the inlet and momentarily we lose each other, the five of us segmenting amongst mangroves and rocks, blowing around like the curled banksia skeletons we find along the trail. When we collect together again we sit for a spell, finding it difficult to escape the wind. We see black swans in the distance and while we are still, the corners of our eyes crawl with the movement of tiny crabs.
Later that evening, with a cold prosecco and a packet of chips, my husband sees the book of essays I am reading resting on the table: Living with the Anthropocene: Love, Loss and Hope in the face of the environmental crisis. ‘Do you feel hope for the future?’ he asks, glancing at our daughters bouncing around the table in the dying light. I can’t find the words for what I feel, a common occurrence for me during conversations about climate change: an awkward amateur, tangling phrases and misremembered statistics. ‘I’d like to say I do,’ I reply. Hope is not a word I would ordinarily use. I am certainly buoyed by the eagerness of environmental movements like the Friends of the Prom, whose delightful emails about working bees to remove sea spurge, planting days and opportunities to monitor the hooded plover population along the coast light up my inbox – but only momentarily. It doesn’t take long for another headline to appear, offering up another climate atrocity, and any hope I feel is easily extinguished. That night I lay in my camp bed thinking of a line in the book, ‘The Anthropocene is a time of pervasive loss and also of profound loneliness.’ In amongst the political warfare, the petitions, the scientific reports, this is where I often find myself, profoundly lonely with my fears, which in the light of day and the throes of domestic life (netball, swimming lessons, spag bol, school pick ups and play dates) can seem completely unreal. It is easy to get lost in domesticity, to see the natural world as something separate to myself, and forget how we all play a part. At the Prom, the preciousness of life, family, place and our interconnectedness is stark.
Later that evening, with a cold prosecco and a packet of chips, my husband sees the book of essays I am reading resting on the table: Living with the Anthropocene: Love, Loss and Hope in the face of the environmental crisis. ‘Do you feel hope for the future?’ he asks, glancing at our daughters bouncing around the table in the dying light. I can’t find the words for what I feel, a common occurrence for me during conversations about climate change: an awkward amateur, tangling phrases and misremembered statistics. ‘I’d like to say I do,’ I reply. Hope is not a word I would ordinarily use. I am certainly buoyed by the eagerness of environmental movements like the Friends of the Prom, whose delightful emails about working bees to remove sea spurge, planting days and opportunities to monitor the hooded plover population along the coast light up my inbox – but only momentarily. It doesn’t take long for another headline to appear, offering up another climate atrocity, and any hope I feel is easily extinguished. That night I lay in my camp bed thinking of a line in the book, ‘The Anthropocene is a time of pervasive loss and also of profound loneliness.’ In amongst the political warfare, the petitions, the scientific reports, this is where I often find myself, profoundly lonely with my fears, which in the light of day and the throes of domestic life (netball, swimming lessons, spag bol, school pick ups and play dates) can seem completely unreal. It is easy to get lost in domesticity, to see the natural world as something separate to myself, and forget how we all play a part. At the Prom, the preciousness of life, family, place and our interconnectedness is stark.
*
As we walk to the beach one day, pulling our blue beach trolley filled with water bottles and apples and towels and sunscreen and boogie boards, I think of a photo I took of my mother on this same track some years ago. She’s looking out over the dunes, at the point where the ocean first appears. Her arm is raised over her forehead to shelter her eyes from the sun. It was a sharp, clear day in mid-winter. The park felt virtually empty that day, and in a common picnic area we saw a deer nestled in soft grass near a barbeque. The deer was brown and smooth. I was captivated; I had never before seen a deer in the wild, albeit far from the right place.
Whilst whimsical to see in the wild, deer have negative impacts on native Australian vegetation and, at the Prom, compete for food with residents such as swamp wallaby, grey kangaroo and the common wombat. The deer looked out of place perched on the edge of a mass of coastal tea tree, and a scene from the apocalyptic movie Children of Men immediately came to mind. Hog deer, now critically endangered in their own habitats of south and southeast Asia, were first introduced at Corner Inlet in 1865 by the Victorian government in conjunction with the Victorian Acclimatisation Society, a group founded by a man called Edward Wilson who apparently had the motto, ‘if it lives, we want it.’ I feel a sense of indignation toward groups like the Victorian Acclimatisation Society, pronouncing Australia’s native flora and fauna substandard to species from Europe, but realise my righteousness is rooted in a deeper feeling: shame. I too am out of place here. I sometimes wonder if I truly respected this place whether I would choose not to visit anymore. Am I just as bad as the deer? Mine, my partner’s and my children’s feet collectively compound and compress the earth, small hands pluck flowers from shrubs before I have time to notice, our shrieks and motors and lights drown out the communication of wildlife.
Whilst whimsical to see in the wild, deer have negative impacts on native Australian vegetation and, at the Prom, compete for food with residents such as swamp wallaby, grey kangaroo and the common wombat. The deer looked out of place perched on the edge of a mass of coastal tea tree, and a scene from the apocalyptic movie Children of Men immediately came to mind. Hog deer, now critically endangered in their own habitats of south and southeast Asia, were first introduced at Corner Inlet in 1865 by the Victorian government in conjunction with the Victorian Acclimatisation Society, a group founded by a man called Edward Wilson who apparently had the motto, ‘if it lives, we want it.’ I feel a sense of indignation toward groups like the Victorian Acclimatisation Society, pronouncing Australia’s native flora and fauna substandard to species from Europe, but realise my righteousness is rooted in a deeper feeling: shame. I too am out of place here. I sometimes wonder if I truly respected this place whether I would choose not to visit anymore. Am I just as bad as the deer? Mine, my partner’s and my children’s feet collectively compound and compress the earth, small hands pluck flowers from shrubs before I have time to notice, our shrieks and motors and lights drown out the communication of wildlife.
*
Despite feeling a great attachment to the Prom, my connection here is nothing more than a blink in the context of deep time. The Prom formed around 350 million years ago, when mainland Australia was joined to Tasmania via a mountain range. Around 20 thousand years ago the last ice age began to retreat, gradually flooding the ocean with water from melting glaciers over a period of approximately eight thousand years. Sea levels slowly rose, cutting off the land bridge joining Tasmania to the mainland. Throughout this time the land was nourished and tended by the Gunaikurnai, Bunurong and Boon Wurrung people, who all have strong cultural and spiritual connections to this region. The land and waters of Yiruk Wamoon are, to this day, deeply significant to the Traditional Owners.
At the southern end of Norman Bay at the mouth of Biddy’s Track stands an outcrop of huge rocks. They are ringed with black mussels, dripping with brine, and stained red and ochre by iron deposits. I like to run my hands along their bumpy, salt- laced surface and think about what they have seen. Coastal erosion over millions of years has allowed the tender curves of granite boulders along this shoreline, so familiar to the Prom, to be revealed. Now they are shaped, ever so slowly, by sun and wind and water. While my children’s future and that of the planet seems uncertain, within the microcosm of these rocks, life feels more solid. Twinkling with glassy quartz, black mica, tourmaline and garnets, they are brimming with choruses of the past and the present. How long before these emblematic boulders are swallowed beneath the surface? Has their incremental disappearance already begun?
I leave my husband and our three daughters at our campsite to squabble over their game of Uno and I walk there, to the end of Norman Bay. Its expanse sweeps out ahead of me, joggers becoming tiny versions of themselves as they pass me and continue on. South Norman feels a long way from the beach cricket and flapping sun shelters at the other end of the bay. I take off my shoes to walk along the low tide mark and the east wind sweeps whispering lines of sand along the solid floor of the beach. It sucks at my hair, and licks and curls at my cheeks like a puppy. My middle daughter calls these wind formations ‘sand snakes’ and shrinks away when they come, pushing her body into my side.
Years earlier, when I was a young adult, my mother would come home from solo Prom camping trips with photos of dead creatures on the sand: birds with wings askew, puffed up fish with no eyeballs, the hollowed out cranials of indistinguishable bodies. We would sit around our blue laminex kitchen bench to look at them. There would be other photos dotted in there too of course, of her campsite, the beach, the trees. But these were not the ones I remember. Here now, I wander up to where the sand is soft, and tuck myself into a line of scattered kelp and weed to walk amongst the crushed cuttlefish and the silent decay of seabird, fish, rope and crab. At the high tide line it is sheltered. I find a dead silver gull, its eyes missing and wings sodden, heavy and glistening with clumps of crystallised sand, its neck twisted awkwardly. I take a photo. I think of the arctic terns in Charlotte McConaghy’s book Migrations and her protagonist’s urgency in following what is quite possibly their last migration from Greenland to Antarctica. This book of fiction describes a futuristic yet almost inevitable world; as a reader you are held in a sense of being on the precipice. The steady disappearance of species described in the book feels all too real in our own changing world.
Standing here beside the dead bird I think about the delicate balance of this biome, and the changes that are already in motion. The silver gull is not a bird that struggles with decline, however, yet another problem emerges from a state of imbalance. Since the 1950s the silver gull population has exploded, with Bird Life Australia reporting that offshore islands that once supported small breeding colonies are now overwhelmed, making it difficult for terns and other seabirds to breed. I look out toward the Glennies and wonder what sort of seabird politics are going on out there. From where I stand the islands appear still and familiar, sitting in a nest of soft grey-green sea mist on the horizon.
At the campsite I find my girls reading a National Geographic Kids magazine. ‘Mum,’ my middle daughter says, ‘Can we get a frog pond at home so the frogs have somewhere to live?’ I look down at the page she has open, featuring endangered frogs, turtles, koalas. ‘Yes,’ I say, yes, because what else is left to say? She goes back to her reading, still believing I am capable of fixing this; yet to harden to the truths of the world.
Once my kids are tucked into their sleeping bags, their dark summer skin rough with sand and glowing against their pillows, I stand outside. There are still people awake; I can hear quiet chatter and the crunch and flash of people walking to the bathrooms with their toothbrushes and head torches. I know that somewhere fossil fuels burn, icecaps melt, old growth habitat is logged, and species are swiftly disappearing. But it feels a far cry from here. I tilt my head back and watch the sky breathe stars to life, and I feel small, and happy, because of my ultimate tiny-ness, reprieved of my sins, of my part to play in all that is unfolding.
At the southern end of Norman Bay at the mouth of Biddy’s Track stands an outcrop of huge rocks. They are ringed with black mussels, dripping with brine, and stained red and ochre by iron deposits. I like to run my hands along their bumpy, salt- laced surface and think about what they have seen. Coastal erosion over millions of years has allowed the tender curves of granite boulders along this shoreline, so familiar to the Prom, to be revealed. Now they are shaped, ever so slowly, by sun and wind and water. While my children’s future and that of the planet seems uncertain, within the microcosm of these rocks, life feels more solid. Twinkling with glassy quartz, black mica, tourmaline and garnets, they are brimming with choruses of the past and the present. How long before these emblematic boulders are swallowed beneath the surface? Has their incremental disappearance already begun?
I leave my husband and our three daughters at our campsite to squabble over their game of Uno and I walk there, to the end of Norman Bay. Its expanse sweeps out ahead of me, joggers becoming tiny versions of themselves as they pass me and continue on. South Norman feels a long way from the beach cricket and flapping sun shelters at the other end of the bay. I take off my shoes to walk along the low tide mark and the east wind sweeps whispering lines of sand along the solid floor of the beach. It sucks at my hair, and licks and curls at my cheeks like a puppy. My middle daughter calls these wind formations ‘sand snakes’ and shrinks away when they come, pushing her body into my side.
Years earlier, when I was a young adult, my mother would come home from solo Prom camping trips with photos of dead creatures on the sand: birds with wings askew, puffed up fish with no eyeballs, the hollowed out cranials of indistinguishable bodies. We would sit around our blue laminex kitchen bench to look at them. There would be other photos dotted in there too of course, of her campsite, the beach, the trees. But these were not the ones I remember. Here now, I wander up to where the sand is soft, and tuck myself into a line of scattered kelp and weed to walk amongst the crushed cuttlefish and the silent decay of seabird, fish, rope and crab. At the high tide line it is sheltered. I find a dead silver gull, its eyes missing and wings sodden, heavy and glistening with clumps of crystallised sand, its neck twisted awkwardly. I take a photo. I think of the arctic terns in Charlotte McConaghy’s book Migrations and her protagonist’s urgency in following what is quite possibly their last migration from Greenland to Antarctica. This book of fiction describes a futuristic yet almost inevitable world; as a reader you are held in a sense of being on the precipice. The steady disappearance of species described in the book feels all too real in our own changing world.
Standing here beside the dead bird I think about the delicate balance of this biome, and the changes that are already in motion. The silver gull is not a bird that struggles with decline, however, yet another problem emerges from a state of imbalance. Since the 1950s the silver gull population has exploded, with Bird Life Australia reporting that offshore islands that once supported small breeding colonies are now overwhelmed, making it difficult for terns and other seabirds to breed. I look out toward the Glennies and wonder what sort of seabird politics are going on out there. From where I stand the islands appear still and familiar, sitting in a nest of soft grey-green sea mist on the horizon.
At the campsite I find my girls reading a National Geographic Kids magazine. ‘Mum,’ my middle daughter says, ‘Can we get a frog pond at home so the frogs have somewhere to live?’ I look down at the page she has open, featuring endangered frogs, turtles, koalas. ‘Yes,’ I say, yes, because what else is left to say? She goes back to her reading, still believing I am capable of fixing this; yet to harden to the truths of the world.
Once my kids are tucked into their sleeping bags, their dark summer skin rough with sand and glowing against their pillows, I stand outside. There are still people awake; I can hear quiet chatter and the crunch and flash of people walking to the bathrooms with their toothbrushes and head torches. I know that somewhere fossil fuels burn, icecaps melt, old growth habitat is logged, and species are swiftly disappearing. But it feels a far cry from here. I tilt my head back and watch the sky breathe stars to life, and I feel small, and happy, because of my ultimate tiny-ness, reprieved of my sins, of my part to play in all that is unfolding.
*
I get up early one morning toward the end of our trip and walk to Tidal River to see the aqua high tide merge with the tannin ribbon of water one last time. Tidal River is notoriously deep tea coloured, almost black in parts, stained by the tea tree and decomposing vegetation along its six-kilometre length. While the water is clean it is mostly impossible to see the sandy bottom. From the track leading up to Pillar Point you can look down upon the twists and coils of riverbed: a sleeping snake winding across the landscape. At the ever-changing mouth of the river there are rounded ridges and moats left over in the damp sand from child’s play the day before, softened by the high tide and the wind overnight. A curve of rock gently cups a pool of water. Three black cockatoos call out and swoop into the trees over the other side, their yellow tails fanning, their calls looping into the bush. Sun lifts over mountain, over ancient rock and crevice, over tree and root and sea. Creamy yellow cones of coast banksia pepper the landscape.
Generational Prom memories overlap in my head until I’m unsure which are mine. Waves licking toes / the distinct feeling of rosellas shifting their weight on my head, shoulders and arms / the sound of the tent whipping in the night / my grandfather holding my daughters’ hands on the beach / the gentle pressure of a broom sweeping across pegged shade cloth / small bodies pushing back against the notorious east wind / children – my mother, my daughters, myself – running, sandy footed, with wild hair in knots around shoulders, around the site and down the tracks and over the rocks that stand, all this time, steady and stoic, immersed in deep, deep time. Back at our site our silver moka pot bubbles and the smell of coffee catches on the breeze. I pour into a stainless steel cup and sit in my canvas chair, facing Mount Oberon and the sunrise, drinking my syrupy camp coffee and synchronising these sensory delights. My children are still asleep.
Generational Prom memories overlap in my head until I’m unsure which are mine. Waves licking toes / the distinct feeling of rosellas shifting their weight on my head, shoulders and arms / the sound of the tent whipping in the night / my grandfather holding my daughters’ hands on the beach / the gentle pressure of a broom sweeping across pegged shade cloth / small bodies pushing back against the notorious east wind / children – my mother, my daughters, myself – running, sandy footed, with wild hair in knots around shoulders, around the site and down the tracks and over the rocks that stand, all this time, steady and stoic, immersed in deep, deep time. Back at our site our silver moka pot bubbles and the smell of coffee catches on the breeze. I pour into a stainless steel cup and sit in my canvas chair, facing Mount Oberon and the sunrise, drinking my syrupy camp coffee and synchronising these sensory delights. My children are still asleep.
*
Each time upon leaving, I look back at a certain point and see the Prom hills rippling on the horizon: slate blue. When will I see them next, and what will have changed? How do I carry the constellation of Prom feelings home? The life waiting for us in the suburbs has a way of taking over, despite continually trying to transfer my focus to bigger things, to maintain a clear perspective. I reach into the back seat of the car and wipe yoghurt from my youngest daughter’s soft little chin (the first car snack delivered while the Prom is still in sight) and the thought that she and her sisters will likely have to go on without me in an ever-changing and turbulent world is almost unbearable. Returning home an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is released: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. It is crawling with words and phrases like loss of habitat, ocean acidification, extreme events, flooding, fire, drought. It discusses risks like loss of kelp forests in southern Australia due to ocean warming, loss of low-lying coastal areas due to sea-level rise, increased heat-related morbidity for both people and wildlife due to heatwaves, and the potential inability of institutions and governance systems to mitigate climate risks. ‘What does extinct mean?’ my youngest daughter asks, hearing me muttering under my breath as I read. I look towards the indigo seas in my mind and hope for a better future.
*
It is unadulterated joy that I feel, in the supernatural beauty of the Prom. In the end, this is what I can offer my children: beauty in its changing landscapes. I can embed in them a love of nature and place, and share with them our collective memories and stories. I’ll tell them how their great-grandfather used to hold their warm hands in his as we walked the Loo-Ern, and how their grandmother complained on the trek up to Mount Oberon as a teen. We’ll continue to repeat the story of the wallaby that chewed my eldest daughter’s pants, and the wombat that tore through our tent when we accidentally left the esky out overnight. I will tell them the names of the few plants and birds I can identify and teach them how to string up a tarp. Small but important wonders. I may not be a climate scientist or an activist, but I can use our love of the Prom to teach them to care, and this important human trait is surely where profound and significant action begins.