Spring is here, spring is here
Life is skittles and life is beer
I think the loveliest time of the year
Is the spring, I do, don’t you? Course you do
But there’s one thing that makes spring complete for me
And makes every Sunday a treat for me…
Tom Lehrer

That music always round me, unceasing, unbeginning, yet long untaught I did not hear, but now the chorus I hear and am elated.  Walt Whitman

It is five in the morning and the sun she’s rising. Old King Koel has been making his lovelorn call for two hours already. As the shadows lift, a lone kookaburra calls. Another answers, and is immediately joined by a choral cacophony. A whip bird calls in the distance, and somewhere in the forest, a white-chested pigeon commences its hopeful woo woo. Just across the way, Barrel-chested wongas waddle across the grass, and on a dance floor bedecked with festive straw swiped from the garden and blue trophies gathered from all over, a bower bird rasps loudly to a potential lady love who is edging across the garden. As she enters his bower, he sits on a branch and serenades her with a melody that is all sweetness.  A mob of spangled drongos chortle and jingle amidst the trees as if they were about to watch the show.

The day brightens and as the nectar warms in the sun, spine-bills and scarlet honey-eaters flock to the bottle brushes, “Ollie, ollie” oriole carols in the tea trees, the noisy friar bird lives up to his name, and satin and regent bower birds bounce on the grevillia ground cover. The fig birds,  all green coats and red eyes, are up early, their minds set on the ripening figs, getting in early before the competition gathers. Through the morning, king parrots squeal as they keep watch over ripening bananas and pawpaws, and yellow robins ring like bells, following us through the gardens as we turn the earth to reveal juicy takeaway. On the forest fringes, a wompoo bassoons his courting carol. Bollocks are blue, bollocks are blue, wom-poo!

The sun moves on, and the day is subdued in the noonday heat. Afternoon reaches for evening and at four o’clock, and as if to schedule, a flight of yellow-tailed black cockatoos cruise in, squarking to each other as they settle into the banksias and casuarinas for a feed. Drongos chuckle and chatter, gamboling and  chasing each other through the trees, carrying on like, well, drongos,  as they take turns to swoop into the dam for a dip.

Then it is beer o’clock, and as we are sitting here, we hear some serous catbird courting. She’s way down in the valley below, and he, up on the spur. Over the next hour, they draw closer and closer together, her call becoming louder and louder, his keener and keener, their calls converging in the forest to our right. And maybe, soon, catbird kittens?

Changeover is upon us, that magical interlude when daytime segues into night-tide and the sounds of daylight and darkness meet, mingle and separate as the one melts and the other flows. Twilight approaches, and there is a flurry of argument and scuffling as birds grab their last snacks and hassle and hustle each other as they retire to their roosts. But the night-tide hunters stir in silence, and tawnies, boobooks and powerful owls depart their shady day-time perches.

And then it is frog time. The generator frog heralds the changeover from day to night. Next, the bleaters start up, followed by the ding dings, the bonk bonks, barkers, and bubble wraps, wark warks and wot wots, and the rubber duckies. And amongt them, little Peronii, the frog who drops down from the foliage of overhanging trees as the air cools. The music of the night!  We are waiting for the flying foxes to cross the evening sky for the silky oak nectar, and soon they will be slurping and chirping. The fireflies are bobbing like a wandering band of fairies through the forest that surrounds us; and the mozzies have begun to butt up against the screens.

And did I mention the snakes? They’re waking early with these unseasonable Septembers …

See below for a picture gallery of our wild friends and neighbours …

See also: Small Stories – A Tale of Twin Pines and Small Stories – the schools of the Tarkeeth  and Loosing Earth – Tarkeeth and other matters environmental

Postscript – About Bellingen

We  in Bellingen Shire, some ten kilometres west of the seaside town of Urunga on the mid north coast of New South Wales. The forest lies between the Bellinger and Kalang Rivers, and these are connected tidally to the ocean at Urunga – the only place in Australia where two rivers meet the ocean together. The forest rises from the rivers on either side of the Fernmount Range, the easternmost extension of the Great Dividing Range that spans the eastern edge of our island continent. Above and between the two rivers, it is a rain-harvesting, filtration and stabilization ecosystem vital to the waterways and wetlands around them, and is a habitat for bird, reptilian, mammalian and marsupial wildlife, including koalas, wallabies, echidnas, quolls, goannas, owls, fruit doves and cockatoos. The east-west Fernmount Range Trail is an ancient highway called the Yildaan Dreaming Track. It led from the plains beyond the Dorrigo massif to what is now the seaside town of Urunga, known then to the Gumbaynggirr people as a “place of plenty”. The first people would descend the spurs on the north and south flanks of the range to fishing and ceremonies on the riverside. The Tarkeeth Forest therefore contains areas of significant indigenous culture, recalling song lines and stories of the Dreamtime, places of ceremony, of birth and burial, and of atrocity.

We have been visiting Bellingen Shire for the last thirty years, and moved a house onto our bush block over twenty years ago. in the Bellinger Valley on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales. Bellingen is well known as a picturesque, well-preserved (founded in 1870) country town. In former times, it was the centre of a thriving dairy and timber industry, and in more recent times, as a popular tourist transit between the university city of Armidale and the country music capital of Tamworth to the west, and the Pacific “holiday coast” of Coffs Harbour, Sawtell, Urunga, and Nambucca Heads, with their sand, surf and sun.

Between the two is the Great Dividing Range, the rolling, high country escarpment of the New England Plateau with its gorges and waterfalls, and the world-heritage Dorrigo National Park with it timeless, untouched rainforests – a “land that time forgot”. And linking them all, the old trunk road, aptly if touristically named Waterfall Way.

Bellingen is popular for its cafes and coffee shops, craft industries and shops, music festivals, and federation facades. It’s visual appeal, and it’s bucolic rural environs have seen the town used on many occasions as a film location. In the seventies, it was a Mecca for young people seeking an alternative lifestyle. The hills thereabout are still scattered with cooperatives and communes, or, in local council-speak, multiple occupancy. In those days, no love was lost between the “hippies” and the farmers and loggers, and politics were dominated by the rural, conservative “born to rule” National and Country Party. Nowadays, it’s heir, the National Party still dominates the political scene, but its clear majorities decrease election by election, and by the turn of the century, there may no longer be a National Party member. But demographics do change, as does society. The hippies’ children and the farmers kids grew up together, attended the high school together, played, partied, and paired, and now, there are grand children and great grandchildren.

As the timber and dairy industry has declined, Bellingen’s economy has changed. Once exclusively agrarian – including a time as one of the prime producers of cannabis sativa – tourism plays a a vital role,  Bellingen advertises itself to visitors and to present and future residents as a clean, green and sustainable shire. Nature’s wonderland, from its golden beaches to its mountain rainforests and waterfalls. Tourist Heaven with a cornucopia of recreational activities for young and old. Lazy bathing and picnicking to energetic rambling and trecking, camping and climbing, canoeing and fishing. Cultural mecca with its cafes, live music,craft and artisan shops, and music festivals.

Two years ago, the online magazine Traveller published a breathless paean to “the bohemian town that is heaven on earth’. Happy traveller Sheriden Rhodes wrote: Some places are so beautiful; it feels like holy ground. For me, Bellingen has always had that consecrated feeling. It’s obvious, given the name the early pioneers gave the Promised Land, a scenic 10 minute-drive from Bellingen’s township itself. Here the land is so abundantly verdant and fruitful; it literally drips with milk and honey. It’s a place so special the fortunate locals that call it home, including its most famous residents George Negus and David Helfgott would much rather keep all to themselves”.

This is the spin. The reality is somewhat different. Bellingen and the “Holiday Coast” generally have seen a large influx of city folk seeking a different lifestyle for themselves and their children, and also of retirees seeking rural or seaside tranquility -in such numbers that Coffs Harbour and its seaside satellites have become in many ways the Costa Geriatrica.

Many newcomers are not fully aware that the Coffs Coast generally is one of the poorest areas of rural New South Wales. Statistics for youth unemployment and senior poverty are among  the highest in the state with all the attendant economic, social and psychological impacts as evidence in high rates of depression, domestic violence and substance abuse. Health and transport services outside the urban centres are  pretty poor. But on the right side of  the ledger, despite the environmental degradation of clear-felling, land-clearing, flammable, monoculture, woodchip-bound eucalyptus plantations that encircle Bellingen, a potential fire bomb primed to explode during one of our scorching, hot dry summers, the generational degradation of the Bellinger’s banks and the graveling up of its once deep depths, and the encroachment and expansion of water-hungry, pesticide and herbicide reliant blueberry farms, we in the Shire are indeed blessed by Mother Nature.

The coastline boasts magnicent headlands and promontories, and long, pristine and often deserted beaches. The World Heritage Gondwana rainforests are a national treasure, and surrounding national parks truly are a natural wonderland. We never tire of the drive from Urunga to Armidale via Waterfall Way, as it crosses the Great Dividing Range and the New England Plateau. The Kalang River as it flows beside South Arm Road and between the Tarkeeth and Newry State Forests is itself one of the Shire’s hidden and largely unvisited secrets, a haven for fishermen, canoeist and all who love mucking about in boats.

Compared to many places on this planet, we’ve really not much to complain about …

---

For other posts in our Small Stories series of ordinary folk doing extraordinary things, see: The Odyssey of Assid Corban, the story of a Lebanese migrant to New Zealand, and The Monarch of the Sea, the rollicking tale of an unlikely “pirate king”.