After the rain
Welcome to my second newsletter for 2020! And after a torrential day in Sydney and plenty of rain across the country, here’s hoping for green shoots and no further disasters...
News
The Jan-Feb 2020 issue of Australian Geographic is out, and with it a story I wrote about hiking in Eungella National Park, in Queensland. The Mackay Hinterland Great Walk is one of Queensland’s Great Walks, and it’s an hour or so’s drive from Mackay on the Queensland coast.
You’ll have to read the article to get the full story, but honestly, I wasn’t 100 per cent sold on this hike. The rainforest is beautiful, but you don’t need to do the full four-day hike to see it - and the rest of the walk is on occasions very steep, poorly signed and along four-wheel-drive tracks. So… I’m glad I did it, but unless you’re mad keen to tick off all the Great Walks, you probably don’t need to put it on your must-do list.
Although I felt pretty prepared with my kit, I knew I would struggle physically with this one, having done no training whatsoever - and I did. Every time I do a multi-day hike with no training, I regret it. Day 2 was an absolute battle, but finishing up the hike on Days 3 and 4 walking through pristine rainforest made it all worth it.
Here I am on the opening spread of the story looking a bit dopey and really, really wanting to get that heavy rucksack off my back:
What I’m reading
You wouldn’t catch Nan Shepherd out unprepared in the wilds. I think of her as the polar opposite of me: supremely self-reliant, sharply observant and tough as nails, striding out across the Cairngorms with a serenity born of absolute knowledge of her place in the landscape. (I’m working on it.)
I came to this book through Robert Macfarlane - I’m not sure which of his books he recommends The Living Mountain in, but when I saw it was being rereleased with an introduction by him, I grabbed a copy. It’s really nature writing at its best: her keen eye and deep immersion in the mountains (plus a taste for the macabre - she loves a grisly ‘death in the mountains’ story) make her a perfect companion. And her phrases are perfection. Water is so clear that “gazing into its depths, one loses all sense of time”. Her eye for colour is extraordinary: water - again - is “green like the green of winter skies, but lucent, clear like aquamarines… The greenness of the water varies according to the light, now aquamarine, now verdigris, but it is always pure green, metallic rather than vegetable.” The hills are “every shade of blue, from opalescent milky-white to indigo… They are most opulently blue when rain is in the air. The the gullies are violet. Gentian and delphinium hues, with fire in them, lurk in the folds.”
This whole book is quotable, but there’s no story - the chapters are titled “Frost and Snow”, “Air and Light”, “Life: The Plants” and so on, and that’s exactly what you get. But read it before bed and you’ll drift off to sleep with the violet gullies and aquamarine waters of Shepherd’s Cairngorms in your mind. And that is a beautiful thing.
Until next week!