Bass Coast Post

Songs of praise

4/5/2021

Toe Pecker is a master of the greeting and farewell.

By Liz Low

‘TAP!’

I turned my head to the sound on the window. There was Toe Pecker, perched on the back of the chair out on the deck and staring hard at me. I put my coffee down.

“Okay, Toe Pecker. Let me finish my coffee.”

It was hard to finish breakfast in peace whilst trying to ignore a magpie fledgling perched about 60 centimetres from my left shoulder with his beak almost on the glass. I’d sneak a peek at him from time to time.

I call him “him”, although it could be “her”. Courtesy of Google, I’ve learnt that magpies take about two years to develop the distinctive male or female plumage that we can recognise.

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Down to earth

13/5/2020

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By Liz Low

THE entry to the Bay Beach at Cape Paterson is through a narrow tea tree path curving across the low dune backing the beach. This last summer, we have been taking a small step up the prostrate tea tree trunk lying across the path onto the sand banked up behind it.

Twenty years ago we just had to duck under the leaning tree. Then, later, came the stage of adults clambering over and children wriggling under the barrier presented by the trunk. A few years later it became easy to just step over and now the trunk offers this barely noticeable step up. I wonder if by next summer it will be totally under the sand blown up by the winter southerlies through the tea tree tunnel.

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Mum’s tea towel

2/4/2020

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Certain humble objects hold strong memories and deserve a fitting end.

By Liz Low

THIS morning I cut up an old tea towel and put the pieces in the compost bin. That sounds a fairly ordinary thing to do but there is quite a back story to that simple sentence.

The tea towel was one of my mother’s and I brought it into our home when Mum moved into a nursing home. The tea towel had previously travelled from the kitchen in the Eaglehawk house where she had lived for 59 years before moving, at 84, to her unit in a retirement village in Melbourne, nearer her two daughters.

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Flower power

3/3/2020

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An old-fashioned garden favourite reminds Liz Low that gardening is one part science and two parts magic.

By Liz Low

THIS summer I’ve rediscovered the hollyhock. Last year, our neighbour had a tall magnificent display of crimson hollyhocks which I could catch glimpses of through a nail hole in the back fence. They swayed and glowed against the grey of the planks. She gave me a little dried pouch of the seeds which I scattered in the soil. Obviously, they needed more attention than that, because nothing happened.

Last spring, on one of my ramblings around Bunnnings garden section, I saw a punnet of hollyhocks – Dwarf Pastel. Well, I didn’t particularly want “dwarf” or “pastel” but, as that was the only offering, I bought them and planted them in the new flower bed up against the back fence. The seedlings sat there, not dying, and gradually filled out and it seemed that I had some hollyhock plants. But would they flower this summer?

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Thrills and spills

27/1/2020

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Liz Low recalls the days when children roamed free and took risks.

By Liz Low

I loved climbing. I think it was about seeing if I could do it, feeling strong and coordinated and then having the reward of being up high and looking around, all by myself.

THERE was a beautiful pine tree down in the park near where we lived in Eaglehawk. Although the lower branches had been lopped off, there was a long one which drooped down over the embankment of the lake. We could jump and bounce on it, like a horse or a seesaw. It was also possible to climb up it to the trunk.

After that, it was just a matter of climbing up, twisting and stepping and pulling my way up through the branches to the very top. Here, the branches opened and spread to make a sort of sitting platform. Once up there, I could change focus from the trunk and branches to look out over Eaglehawk through the sparse pine needles. The lake lay below me. The Whipstick forest spread for miles in a grey-green canopy of small box trees to my right past the last street. The marshy overflow area reached out to the pine plantation behind me, and I could see some houses straggling along the streets: Napier, Victoria, Church. Looking down gave a bit of a whoosh to the stomach. The other kids looked very small from up there. The climb down was harder and more frightening, especially the gap where I had to hang from one branch while my feet felt for the next one below me. Coming down felt as good an achievement as the climb up, and I was really proud of that climb.

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Margaret the Magpie

13/11/2019

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Magoie family, Wonthaggi, spring 2019. Dad is in the black (obscured), with the three siblings in grey, Photo: Pauline Wilkinson

By Liz Low

MARGARET the Magpie’s baby is dead. I found the baby bird on the curve of the road when I had wandered out after breakfast to see how the garden was getting on. I had been pleased to see the first agapanthus splitting open its flower pod then, out of the corner of my eye, noticed a small mound on the road. Something had been squashed. I stepped closer. It was a bird.

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A bird’s eye view

24/10/2015

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By Liz Low

I STROKE the branch of the coastal gum which leans over a corner of our deck. The breeze moves it around causing it to feel like a horse or a boat moving at the end of a rope.

This branch has a scar on its underside where it used to sway and rub against the tall deck pole when the wind got up. The rubbed bit is dry, rough and brown and reminds me of a healed up abscess. The bark I am feeling is smooth, cool and almost muscular. It could be an arm, an arm of the tree waving and stretching up into the sky and light.

We sited our house at Cape Paterson around some medium sized trees and since being given shelter from the winds by the house, they have grown, stretched up and opened out. We used to have foliage at the upstairs windows and now there are sinewy, slender branches to look through.

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Brief encounter

18/4/2015

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Second surf at Cape Paterson. Photo: Liz Low

By Liz Low

EASTER Saturday at Cape Paterson was fine and clear and Second Beach was just asking to be visited. I’d not been able to walk on anything other than footpaths for the past few months following my hip replacement in the middle of January. A whole summer had passed me by while I gradually built up my strength and flexibility.

The path to the beach stretched and wound between the banksia and tea trees. My legs and hip were able to walk on the soft uneven sand with enjoyment. The familiar dune vegetation honey smell hung in the air as I followed the path up to the top of the dune. There in the distance was the ocean, blue and bright, at the end of the stretch of green trees and bushes that the path threaded through.

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A crime against nature

1/3/2014

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The "water sensitive urban design solution" at Tenby Point

Council engineers have devised an expensive scheme to “mimic” the natural water cycle they are deliberately disrupting.

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In praise of dirt roads

30/11/2013

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By Liz Low

ONE day earlier this year, we opened the mail to find that Bass Coast Shire Council, under Special Charge Scheme No. 27, planned to charge us $32,700 to seal, concrete curb and channel our dirt road and lay a concrete footpath. About 450 houses in the heart of Cape Paterson have been similarly afflicted because we choose to live on the original unsealed roads.

Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about why I love dirt roads.

We were very pleased to find a block of land on a dirt road. We didn’t want to live on a suburban-style subdivision with a vista of dark grey asphalt, white curbs and white concrete footpaths, white concrete driveways and neatly mown grass nature strips planted with trees at measured intervals. We didn’t want the rigid geometry and hardness of such a scheme.

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