Places and Platitudes

The department in which I work calls themselves “placemakers”, which is an interesting turn of phrase. I liked it at first because I felt that yes, being a horticulturalist does mean you are very literally making places. You are making places by planting things in which ants will colonise. You are creating paths wending through rock-studded earth. You are nourishing the soil with compost and you are watering it all until you’ve transformed some trees into a woodland or a forgotten corner into a garden. But recently I’ve come to put a question mark after it in my mind. Placemaker? For the longest time, I thought this idea of placemaking was one of the reasons I was so connected to the land up here because I was a special breed of person, I was a creator as well as an inhabitor of this place. But the 2019/2020 bushfire season took a wrench to my perspective, adjusting it a little, and I now see the hubris of that idea. Because what I’ve come to realise of late is that no one makes places, it’s places that make us. 

Telling myself for so long that I was some sort of omnipotent being, that I was crafting landscapes, I was always Icarus headed for a fall. If you have grown up in the Australian expanse, be it the oceans that stretch out to the horizon, the red, sand dune mounded centre, or the ancient and echoey mountains, you are constantly reminded that you are just a tiny dot in a huge expanse. It’s this expansiveness that (should) develop in you an inherent humility because you are reminded everyday of how insignificant you truly are. When you’ve been tossed around by the ocean until salt water is coming out your nose or stuck in a snow flurry ten kilometres from your car with only one glove to shield your rapidly blue-ing hands, you are reminded that her beauty and her terror will always come for you. And yowzers was I reminded last fire season when she blazed and smouldered and zoomed me out until I was that little speck on the horizon again.

I have had fierce writers’ block for a year and unable to articulate anything in its entirety apart from fragments of things and short poems, so here I go, writing my halting love letter into the void of how these mountains have made me into the things I feel define me; a runner, a writer, a mother and a gardener. 

Place and being wild

I have dedicated a good chunk of my life to the notion of being wild. This sounds like absolute white girl tripe I know, and largely it is, but also I think being wild is an innately human and maybe very Australian thing. When I say “being wild”, I mean doing things that I feel driven by my instincts to do. Being wild is why I run so much. Like a shark that dies if it stops moving, I need to move to feel alive. I need to get dirty, I need to feel scared and alone. I need to pee on the ground and scream into the wind. I like to do base things. I am in every sense of the millennial phrase, a basic bitch. And I think the main driver of this desire is this big place I inhabit. 

Living in the mountains and existing in the places there; specifically, places like Narrow Neck and Mount Banks, the sense of depth and breadth is actually unfathomable. Have you ever noticed how echo-ey Men At Work’s I Come From A Land Down Under is? Like that flute is just tooting off into a fucking canyon and reverberating into eternity? That is no mistake, friends, that is straight up the best auditory allusion to our country’s literal greatness that I know. And that’s how it is where I live, expansive, nothing-y and alone-y (but never lonely). But it’s also ever-changing, like a magic eye keeping your eyes fighting to maintain focus. Some days, you can look out into the distance and think “oh yeah, that's a long way away. There are lots of trees there, and for sure at least seven yowies” but there are also days where I swear I feel like I’m going to swing my foot off the edge of Mount Banks and step straight onto the ledge of a cliff kilometres away because those distances feel so tiny. This is especially apparent in that Heidelberg light at the tipping point of winter where it starts thinking about being spring soon. The sandstone cliffs on the other side of the world look like you could touch them, like sedimentary rock sirens calling you to them. And it is in infinite places like this that I can really feel wild, free and like I am the actual, real Maz hidden beneath the everyday-use Maz veneer. 

I also have this very strong urge to run beneath full moons. I know this sounds like hippy-dippy mountain stuff (it is) and like I am a lunatic (I am). In actual fact, the word lunatic has the word “luna” (the moon) at its base, so that is very literally what I am, drawn to the moon like a moth. There is something so cleansing about running beneath a full moon. The first full moon under which I had a chance to run after the fires, set at 6 am followed by sunrise at 6.30 am. I hit the damp, dark and spooky trail at 4 am, cold, alone, and a little afraid. But beneath that full, luminescent sphere setting on one side and the burning sun rising dutifully on the other, I felt so safe and relieved, encircled by those same orbs which have touched every human in existence. And it was after that run all alone with my beloved Narrow Neck in the muted dawn light, seeing her healing from the fires, that I started to feel alright again. 

Place and my actual, physical body

And while the mountains regularly influence how I feel emotionally, they also affect how I physically look. The places which are dear to me have shaped my actual corporeality. Like a mother growing a child in her womb and birthing it into the world, the molecules of food she consumed and the air she breathed literally rearranged in her uterus to shape an actual human, so too does the earth on which we tread physically build our bodies. You know when you’re a kid and you learn about gravity and they tell you that gravity is pushing down on you from above, but also that the road beneath your feet is exerting that same force back upwards too? That’s what places do. While our footprints, dragged sticks and tire marks leave a trace on them, those tracks and trails physically influence us as well.

Recently I visited the little string of waterholes that runs along the Grose River at the bottom of Victoria Falls. I had the day to myself and it was warm. The last time I had run down into this salubrious refuge the canopy had been dense and the light mottled in that perfect way that neither makes you squint nor leaves you cold when you emerge sodden from a sand-bottomed pool. And I forgot that this canopy had been turned into so much ash. So of course, I got sunburnt. The shelter I took for granted was gone and this place had turned me a blush pink which has now faded to a light tan, meaning that the exact shade of my shoulders now, is attributed to a two and a half kilometre stretch of sandstone and gums.

Running on trails as opposed to a road or a treadmill informs my body’s shape in a specific way, too. Trails are uneven, they’re undulating, rock-ridden, you spend time leaping away from what you think is a snake but is, in actual fact ALWAYS JUST BARK. There are Hakeas which scratch you, Xanthoreas which tempt you off the path and into thickets of blackened wood which draw, like a child, on your shins. And it is because of the geography of those trails that my calf muscles have a particular shape, solid and sinewy,  that they would not have were I to run on a flat road, or never at all. My core muscles wouldn’t be near as firm if not for their need to constantly stabilise my little body hurtling along an uneven trajectory. My feet would not be so callused and thick bottomed if it weren’t for the teeny rocks that sting me through my shoes. My legs not constantly marked with new scratches and scarred with old ones and my rump not so big, if not for the hills that force my glutes to engage for hours on end. Sometimes, when I look at myself in the mirror, I feel that I look like the mountains.

Place, my mind, and my words

There is a legacy of way-too-long sentences and rambling poems and prose, that are due directly to the places I love. There is something about rhythmic footfalls, isolation, sandstone scents, and wet foliage that banish all writer’s block and have me writing like a fiend in my head. Pretty much everything I’ve written, from descriptions of vases or blogs about dividend yields, to my very best poems, has come from the trails around my home. 

If I died tomorrow, all that would be left of my personality would be a digital footprint and all the words that I’ve put down on paper. So largely, what would be left of my soul would be words about the best places I know. And I love that the trails are able to conjure up imagery in me, that flows out my fingers and onto the page, and someone on the other side of the world will know about these places. I am their conduit and they are singing to you from across roads, gorges, mountain ranges and oceans. It’s very pleasing that Nellie’s Glen’s cool, fairy-dell feel for example, can seep out of the pixels on the screen and into those who read this blog, until you can hear that water trickling beside the stairs in the stream after rain. Until you can smell that damp, rotten wood and mossy stench that is a little yuck and a little comforting. Until you can hear the call and response of whip birds, such a short delay between the two, you would think it’s one bird somehow calling from both sides of your head.

I haven’t written something for myself in a while, and I can hear the music playing trying to get me off the stage, but I don’t really remember how to wrap this stuff up. Except to just quickly expand on the writers’ block I mentioned at the start of this essay. As much as my writing, running, body and soul are linked to, and made by, the places I adore when those places are damaged, I physically and spiritually suffer. In the Blue Mountains, we are still reminded daily of the devastation 2019’s fires wrought. The drive to work is still a requiem to what was (though the epicormic growth on the Eucalypts is looking rather festive in its green and red glory). The trails and tracks that shaped my routine are either still closed or were only just reopening now, as the floods came through. One bed of the garden which I tended at work is completely gone, slated to be cut down and chipped. I saw no snakes on a run the other day, which up until now, has been the snakiest run I’ve known. And to compound this damage, the floods of two weeks ago have separated me from one of my core places, indefinitely. Due to a landslide on Bells Line Of Road, for the past two weeks I’ve been unable to reach the garden, and the plants and people therein, who I love more than I love myself. But it’s given me the time and reason to write all this. And I’m sorry it was long, but I needed to rationalise to myself who and what I am without these places currently in my life, and writing this has helped. 

TLDR shortcut to reading this entire thing; I made an artwork which is basically a four and a half minute visual and poetic embodiment of this blog’s vibe. Unfortunately, it is currently running silently on a loop where no one can see it at work, but you can watch it below. And may I run on these trails again soon, be back in the garden shortly and in the arms of that Mother Earth who makes me who I am; fierce, strong and oozing emotion all over the place.