TheBanyanTree: Walking the Illawarra escarpment

[Peter Macinnis]

In 1974, when our oldest son was born, my wife went to a residential 
mothercraft centre to learn the ropes. Her own mother's ideas were 
antiquated, my own mother's advice fluttered between the useless, 
fruitbattery and the potentially lethal, but Chris picked up the 
knowledge and confidence to tackle child-rearing, and formed some bonds 
which have lasted something over 35 years.

Every so often, the mothers who were there in her week meet for lunch or 
whatever. For my part, I prefer to avoid the gatherings, because the men 
were all tall, bluff, booming rugby types whose conversation revolved 
around share prices and the intricacies of off-road vehicles. I was 
never sure whether a limited slip differential was part of a vehicle or 
something used in the derivatives market.

One of them seemed a bit less obnoxious, and because his wife was one of 
Chris' best friends, I sort of put up with him over the years, but with 
no great enthusiasm.

In retrospect, what a wasted opportunity! Warren has not only played 
less Rugby than I (I notched up a career total of around 20 minutes) but 
he is an enthusiastic bushwalker.  By trade, he is an endocrinologist 
and his wife Lyn is a GP (medico in general practice) is just as 
enthused by wilderness walks, but they now prefer to go out in a 
slightly larger group.

We are all getting along in years and there is more safety in having a 
four in the party. Their problem has been finding people of their age 
and temperament who can keep up. The end result is that we are doing 
more walks together with them.

Because of his work (mainly on diabetes), Warren is very keen on 
exercise that involves walking without motor vehicles. In the longer 
term, he thinks he may assemble a web site of walks that can be 
effected, far from the madding crowd, but using public transport, so as 
to avoid having to return to a starting point.

He says he enjoys my company, because I make him look normal. By an odd 
chance, this, in reverse, is my assessment of his own greatest 
usefulness. We aren't identical, though: he said yesterday that he has a 
problem, in that other people don't understand him. I countered that 
other people have a problem, in that they don't understand me.

Yesterday, we drove to their house, then drove in their car to a railway 
station, where he has a parking spot, then took a train to the coast an 
hour or so south of Sydney, a point where coastal cliffs loom more than 
300 metres above the sea, with a stacked geology that has sandstone on 
top, then shale, then coal. We took a cab and then walked along the dry 
sandstone escarpment before taking an ancient track, once a bullock-cart 
track but almost certainly dating back to pre-white days, winding down 
over shale through tall, straight trees, back to the railway line.

If/when I get back to a planned, half-done and stalled series of YA 
historical fiction, that area is going to feature in a chase scene. I 
probably should say when/if because I am regathering my interest in the 
project. Just as soon as I finish the current effort, which is a book to 
be called 'Australian Backyard Naturalist': a guide for young readers on 
where to find weird wildlife, and what to make of it. My trade, so much 
as I have one, is that of biology teacher, but I have spent my life 
poking my nose down burrows, poking sticks in crevices and trapping 
strange wild things. Chris is also a biologist.

Warren and Lyn like having us along, because while they know the routes, 
we know the plants, the animals and the rocks far better, and I know 
where to look for them. We like going along because we see new places, 
and because it is helping me fill in the photographic gaps for 'ABN'.

Along the way yesterday, I had two main targets: catching and 
photographing a leech and a centipede. We missed both of those*, but I 
got a marvellous mistletoe, we found some digger wasps (aka sand wasps) 
digging their burrows, something I have never before seen in the wild, 
and on the train home, Warren found a live tick which went into a tube 
for photography tomorrow. It was running along Lyn's leg at the time.

There was some confusion, and at one point, the tick dropped and ran off 
along the seat, causing one of us to speculate about whether "I must 
have got it off a train seat" would be more or less believable than 
saying that an STD must have been acquired from a toilet seat. 
(Traditional medical response: "that's a funny place to have sex".)

He also found a live tick that had attached to his lip, so back at his 
house, he put on a special cream to kill it and then gave me that tick 
as well. The cream has a story attaching to it: you can only get it on 
prescription, but with two doctors in the house, that was no problem.

He bought one tube, but they have a holiday house, so he then wrote 
himself a script for a second tube a day or so later, and noticed an odd 
look from the pharmacist, so when he got home, he read the labelling and 
learned that the product he knows best for its power to kill ticks and 
make them let go without injecting toxins, is primarily recommended for 
dealing with pubic lice. Clearly, the chemist wondered what the two 
doctors had been up to.

We are starting to see his larrikin streak coming forth now the guards 
are down. I started things by telling a few tales of eccentrics that I 
am gathering for the ingenuity book. In particular, I mentioned Lord 
Berners, who, among other tricks, would ensure that he had a railway 
compartment to himself. At stations, he would don a black skull-cap and 
black spectacles, and lean from the window, beckoning at boarding 
passengers. If this was not enough to scare people off, he would produce 
a clinical thermometer and take his temperature at five-minute 
intervals, with a worried look on his face.**

Warren then told us of an occasion when he rang his wife from the train 
to say that he would be at the station at 6:13 pm, and would she pick 
him up? An Englishman who was travelling on the train asked him how he 
knew this. Warren asked him if he had seen the film 'Rain Man'. The 
Englishman said he had. Well, said Warren, he was the Australian version 
of the Rain Man, and he had been out on day release. The startled man 
expressed a flustered hope that it had been a pleasant day release and 
beat a hasty retreat.***

And this is the bloke who opined on one walk that I looked like Mr Bean 
when I produced a portable vacuum cleaner  (a 'Dust Buster') and started 
running it over some trees to gather microfauna so I could photograph 
them when I got home!

Anyhow, what a pity we didn't get to know each other better sooner. 
Sydney would have been a changed city by now, if we had tackled it in 
our primes. We are working on catching up now, though.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

* Well, not entirely missed. A leech showed up in the washing machine 
today.  We think it must have been in clothes, and it was now well and 
truly dead, though seeping blood. It was small, but it will do at a 
pinch and it couldn't move, so I photographed it. No animal entering 
these premises at the moment is safe from being made into an exhibition.

** Berners was what they then delicately called a confirmed bachelor. 
There is one tale about Berners that I have been unable to confirm, 
although Diana Mitford, Lady Mosley (she married the unspeakably nasty 
Oswald), claimed that it was true. Berners preferences were no secret, 
and a bogus newspaper report of an engagement between him and Violet 
Trefusis, a lesbian, upset Violet's mother to the extent that she 
demanded that there be a public denial.

According to Lady Mosley, Berners sent a note "to the London papers", 
indicating that "Lord Berners has left Lesbos for the Isle of Man". 
Another version has his mother demanding the withdrawal, and claims that 
the notice appeared in 'The Times'. The closest I have been able to find 
is a Court Circular, published in 'The Times' in 1933, reading simply 
"Lord Berners has arrived in Lesbos".

*** In palaeoanthropology (another of my trades), we have something 
called "the subway test" which basically is: if this near human sat 
beside you in the subway, would you stay where you are, move to another 
seat, head for another carriage or leap screaming from the nearest 
window.  Warren apparently was a type III on this occasion.  No matter. 
  He makes me look normal.



-- 
  _--|\   Peter Macinnis, word tinker, and science gossip,
/     \  William McGonagall Fellow in scansion adjustment, University
\.--._*  of Anson Bay, anapest exterminator, MCSE in iambic mechanics,
      v   http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/index.htm