The Bush Behind My Place

July, 2024

It’s the ghost gums that you see first when you get to the bush behind my place. 

There’s a string of them on the ridge that stand there to catch the first light in the morning. they’re right behind my back fence, amber and golden and white and their branches twist and torture their way upward like they’re fighting against something but they’ll never tell us what. 

They catch the moonlight and are alight in the dark in the night; you must have seen them?

The leaves smell like nothing else in the world, especially when they burn. They curl and burn from the inside out so you can just see the outline and the stem, and then they stay like that for ages in the coals until the wind takes them into the air and they float and dance and turn grey and disappear.

They smell like nothing else, but then also they smell like winter and bonfire nights with your pyjama pants under your trackies and your ma made you a hot chocolate in her orange flask. 

I loved the stars on those nights, most of all. I remember you there one year – you threw a bunch of crackers into the fire and they exploded ash everywhere. That was so long ago, you probably don’t remember. 

Gum leaves don’t make a crunch underfoot like most dried leaves – they squelch and I can feel the dampness under them from the rain we had through the winter. I’d never realised that until recently, but It’s quite unique. 

I’m carrying that orange flask now as I jump the fence, holding the branch that’s been there for thirty years to mark the boundaries of wild and unwild, and allows me between both.

It’s red and dimpled, my hand’s worn in a mark and lightness to the bark that feels familiar, welcome. I don’t want to make a mark on the bush, but it looks like the tracks that a possum makes up a tree and that feels alright. 

It’s about here that you can both hear the whipbirds at the creek, whyyyyyup, and the purr of cars up on the road going in and out of their antholes. right on the edge. 

there’s a wallaby that lives on the ridge here, you would have seen him? 

In the mornings he’s on the eastern end at the fold in the ridge where there’s a swamp that drains off the cliff into a little damp cave underneath.

We caught yabbies there once with a bit of sausage and twine, remember? We painted our faces with the clay from the cave walls and we said we were cavemen, and I really believed it. 

There was a big bit of tin roofing in the creek and I’ve wondered about how it got there for so long, and why? There were plants growing through a hole in it, the corner was buried in sand – did that make it belong?

I found a sadness in it. But you just dragged it back up to your house and then it was gone.

I felt like I’d missed something, then, like you knew something I didn’t, I’d got it wrong. I thought I should have been the one to drag it out. 

I understand, now. It was to have the tin to yourself, not to free the creek of it. I’ll never get to tell you that.

In the dusk the wallaby is on this side, small black and grey thing that never looks at me – just keeps on his task as I pass through, each of us silent, calm and unlooking like stars passing in the night.

When I see an animal in the wild it makes me feel like everything could actually be ok. Do you know what I mean? Like we haven’t broken it, yet. there’s still a wildness out there that’s found this little gap between the highway and the town and doesn’t know about bitcoin or town planning or whatever, and maybe everything could be ok.

There are flannel flowers that only grow up here. Flannel Flowers that seem to spring and flower in no regular season, only answering to the sun. After the last fire through here they swarmed the ridge in gangly shoots, falling over each other in a tangle when the rain came, the soft felt petals sagging towards the earth. I hope I can see that again. 

They’ve figured them out now, somehow – flannel flowers – and you can see them growing in people’s yards. They’re never the same; that flower of our childhood, as weird and delicate as our childhood felt –  belongs on the ridge like sandy bushwalks in billabong shirts, scratched knees, I reckon.

There’s a track that my neighbour made for his grandchildren years ago. it snakes down to the fire trail, under a small overhang that drips on your head and across a rock shelf. At the end there were two steps down the short cliff that he, jJoseph, concreted onto the sandstone, crisscrossing lines in them so his grandkids wouldn’t slip on them.

A while ago – their job done, and all of us kids grown up and Joseph’s grandkids moved on – I chiselled those steps off to take it back to the raw rock and there’s moss growing there now like two little carpeted steps. It makes me smile. 

There’s a bright sparkle of dew on the dark green wad that catches the moon. It’s crisp and wet to touch and I’m careful not to slip as I step down. 

I cross the firetrail quickly, that orange clay burn that cuts through the bush. Kids make bike jumps on it and the firies come through and flatten it again every few months so they’re ready for a fire in the summer when the bush asks us to leave again. This is where they stand their ground and fight back. 

over the edge of the firetrail it drops suddenly before it flattens out in a gentle slope down towards the main creek. 

It’s beautiful, open and the light is grey, patched under the taller trees.  

Here:

Big boulders like marbles left behind.

Two big sandstone fingers that lay next to each other, a passage between them with years of fallen sticks and leaves. 

Ant mounds pouring out hundreds of little green and black squiggles and swarms of flies that sound like summer nights. 

New green gums, just my height and no thicker than your wrist, shooting up looking for space in the canopy, and vines already starting to weave themselves between them. I’ll come back and check for a tree snake in there in the summer, if I can. 

It goes on a for a while like this; familiar, comfortable. 

The creek is noisy, a stream no more than a foot wide but worn down into the earth almost a metre, like the bush can’t hold it up any more. There are little swirling holes of water, foaming and spinning.

a branch has washed down, stuck between two trees and forming a dam – catching twigs and dried grass. the water splashes up against it. 

I picked your kid’s juice popper out of there yesterday, and some cable ties last week, but there’s nothing there now. 

I jump over and pause a moment to listen to the humming defiance of the water. 

I close my eyes and picture it washing soap suds off someone’s new Mazda only a kilometre away, running the street and out of the stormwater drain at the end of the new estate. it spills across the back of your house and, with whatever it finds there, starts working its way down the valley; the bush cleansing it a little at each step without ever being asked to and asking for nothing back at all. 

Despite that, it’s green around the creek, packed with ferns and a busy dampness. 

I keep on back up the other side of the valley. it thins out quickly, and then I can see your place.

I see the light, first, actually – a sharp white spotlight on top of your house that cuts through the trees like a pointless accusation. You’ve got it angled so you can see the tops of the trees, but high enough not to catch the pile of bones – the dozens of gums they bulldozed to make way for your big cube.

A bit closer I can start to see the glow from the rest of the lights, the ones you point up to the glass facade like you’re on show (to who?). 

It’s hard to see you from this angle – the house on its concrete stilts towering over the trees, embarrassed and vulnerable under the spotlight, unsure what they’ve done. 

Maybe you haven’t actually seen the way the ghost gums glow, after all? 

I can’t see any stars from this side with all the light. all the trees are lit up, but you can’t see the bush here – not the wild thing that never seems to move except to clap against itself in the breeze, and yet is never the same. 

I ran into your Ma the other day. she asked me if I’d seen you in the paper for the architecture award and your bitcoin thing. My ma is gone now, like the trees and the wallaby that lived on this side of the valley. You can turn the light off and the stars will come back, but not the rest.

I climb a big sandstone block that I watched you point a clipboard and dirty keyboard finger at – you were directing a digger that they had to drop in with a crane. They still couldn’t push that block down the valley and we are both here now – the block and I, me on top of it – to spite you. 

I kneel down and undo my flask. I’m watching you on the phone in the window with still so much to say. I drink some coffee, it’s still steaming and will stay hot for hours in this flask.

You’re still pointing that finger and you’re looking out but you can’t see me from all of the light. Or you would have spotted me weeks ago. 

That day under the cave when we painted our faces and you dragged that bit of tin back up to your house, you stuffed a handful of that clay in my mouth and held it there while I coughed and spat. You only let go when I swallowed a bit. You laughed so much. I can feel it in my mouth now and it feels like I know the earth, like it’s got something for me to say. 

I light a cigarette and hold it up, looking through the smoke to your cube of glass. 

There’s a collection of fallen leaves in a hollow on top of the rock. I pick up a handful and crush them between my fingers. Gum leaves don’t crunch underfoot, even when they’re dry. They slide. I’d sound like our wallaby if I walked right up under your house, the leaves moving in a wad under our grey feet.

I miss the stars at bonfire night; hopeful stars that felt like you weren’t there to see them or be seen by them but you were both just doing your thing wandering around with your ma and moving about as the sky did its thing above you; how it’s meant to be. 

I pick up a handful of gum leaves and squeeze them. 

They’re still too wet to burn.

by Sparrokei