The Victorian heath grows gnarly on soil derived from granite.
Up in these dry stony ranges the block grey slate turns on its side. It splits like two flat hands joined together and passing one another.
There is rain, but the communities of trees soften its fall and turn it into the mist they can drink.
The manna gums and stringybarks dampen their bark. The wet shrubby soil and muscle of the root system rises up, until you want to inhale it.
Stringy bark and swamp gum. Australia reminds me of stringy bark, as if the landscape is stringy, and won't supply the wood with nutrients.
The open forest adjusts to the stringy bark foothills.
On the drier inland slopes are box type eucalyptus, there could have been any number of them.
Manna gum are present in valleys. They are the living rooms of the koalas. We began to walk along ridges and gullies.
The koala is balanced, his round backside in the fork of the manna gum.
A heavily featured bear indented by branches.
This is Australia, I thought.
These are the koalas who live in the Brisbane Ranges.
I felt deeply grateful to see them living there in the tall manna gums, with split and straggly eucalyptus leaves like fallen hair.
* * * *
We pass by the grass trees, that grow on the stony soils carrying heath, with flowers that mass on a thick tan spike, or on a long stiff spare stalk.
This is the community of austral grass trees.
This is their house, their doorway a carousel of breezes and long needles, the greens a special kalideoscope.
They are facing all directions, swirling their many arms.
The centre of the grass tree reaches into the clear night air.
The swelling moon brushes its crown of burnt olive green, as it passes through the ranges each month.
Amongst the austral grass trees are the windy carousels.
The dry papery leaves move through the stillness, like soft needles that make you want to stop and rest, where they grow.
We made ourselves dizzy when we played inside them.
The peaceful merry-go-rounds of the heathland, they livened up the dead grasses of autumn with their vibrant green hats.
The austral grass trees dominate the Brisbane Ranges and extend into the Grampians. We must cherish the day that a species extends.
Firstly, it is a uniform extension, with a couple of other species making brief and isolated appearances, then they seem to extend and extend.
* * * *
Until gradually another species appears, say Hakea, the bushy needlewood,
and then the species that have dominated and extended, seem to die off in order to create more space for the new emergents.
Occasionally, there are the species that dot the place intermittently, and who may appear scant and in unexpected places,
such as mountain corea and the common corea, with their heart shaped leaves and brownish hairy stems.
They will all be lying in the grass, face up and glistening, like they are delicate and dusky, in the dense understorey on the moist sheltered mountain slopes.
They cause a walker to look down, now matter how hurriedly they may be passing through, with their soft bell flowers of green, red and yellow.
This is the walking track in the Brisbane Ranges, where the grass is a bell.
in the sub-alpine heights.
Something makes you want to touch and protect them.
Something about its sparse fragility or cold growing beauty. It was like finding ways into the deep time of this place.
* * * *
I lifted a tiny piece of moss from a clump of rich brown soil that its roots had been working through, churning down through like worms in the ground.
It was like someone I know had fallen -
It was snowy white, amongst this pallid place, in the dull grey country.
It was like the sea had retreated from these ranges, leaving this piece of coral behind, which softened its brittle salty crust and began to grow like a shrub.
It was so delicate, that it lifted like lightning from the finger, and tore like a moth's wing.
I would not lift moss from the ground again,
no matter how easily it broke away.
Later in this same area, I saw a big dead moth lying in the scrub. It was the size of my open hand and the complex colour of a winter sun.
Dry heaths in floristic composition digging into the dry skeltetal soils.
By using a pod, we both stood for ages trying to hear the wind through its leaves, through a droppy she-oak on the rocky hills of Victoria.
* * * *
Today, we have been close.
When the grass trees finally ran out and the hakea began, we were pricked in our arms and legs, as the path gradually closed up.
Soon we were drowning in bushy needlewood and there seemed nowhere else to turn. There was no going forwards and no going back.
I tried every option of passing them, without interference, before I finally kicked one down.
It had been digging into my skin and I was exhausted.
It made me think of all the things I had kicked down in life, when I felt I had no other option.
The thorny bushes had opened their seeds pods, and there would soon be many more of them.
They were taller than me and the seed has been well protected.
Inside the seed pod it was hard timber the colour of rich Western Australian jarrah, and in the deep still centre of that small hollow, was the resting place for the seed.
There needed to be a fire swept through the place, before those pods would open.
It is like what rests deep inside us, the opening is dramatic and often needed a catastrophic event to cause it.
Needle like leaves spread straight along the hilly country, are experienced as a component of heaths and scrubby understoreys in open forests.
It is where we found them living,
the complete communities of resistant hakeas, leaves rigid and terrific, needle sharp and green, fruits persisting for years, becoming rough and knobby, broad and timber-edged with the double pointed beak.
They flower in winter, the first white flowers uncurling in May.
* * * *
We have walked through the manna gums and the stringy barks, the open forests, heathlands and water courses strewn by reeds and rocky hilly places.
'The kangaroos live here,' I said, 'they eat the grass, they stop and look, they do many other things that we'll never know about.'
It has been a good day, with the sulphur crested cockatoos twirling and screeching in the clear dusk air.
It's a raucous inland voice, briefly echoing off the pinkish red walls of the Ankaie Gorge, where brown water rests translucent on the rocks,
so still, that it would require your aching feet, or our dry bush hands to push it past itself.
This day has a rich and complex ending. Everywhere is departing from everywhere else.
For a long time after, I will be called back into those deep ranges.
But when I come back I will be different and the day will be different.
Tomorrow the grass tree carousels will move through the stillest air and the tiny coral moss will be quivering where I left it.
Our passing was a brief event, our tired and grateful footsteps through their territory.
