Rain:- ringing, dinting, bouncing bubbling flashing jeweled beadlets, raising commotion, and welts, white-crusted with cloud-light, upon the surface of that dark, vitreous serpentine sliding slabbed, ripple-roped and hauled to the falls, around broad, mudstone paving.
The ever-expanding overlapping rings, fleeing staccato jolts of drops, fading into shaken chaos, work their hypnotism, as I lean my chin on staff and remember Teesdale, animist at four years, singing in the rain beneath yellow sou'wester under a weeping willow: 'There's a Din-man in the river...' ('Dins' as mother termed her noisy children).
Now, I'm still noisy but rivers lilt more bonny-blythe, more cannily, more hauntingly, more chucklesome than I,
this one bordered by eucalypts, wattles, tea trees, sleek-slinking its glassy green between the sandstone walls of gorge, carved to snake a luscious belly, flashing white at roaring, rocky narrows, lingering deep-coiled in pooling corners, from Lake Tabberabbera down through the Gippsland plain.
Breathe wet eucalyptus vapors overlaid with wattle sweetness, while the kookaburra dins his hugger-mugger camaraderie way upstream; look deep down in wombat diggings, six foot or more, of rich black soil, that river-bank accumulation hoarded for weeds - even skinny thistles where Scots once settled.
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The slots of stags imprinted on the path, the little trees rubbed clear of bark, tell of the bloody velvet-shedding, and where once the aborigines would have sheltered in holes and overhangs in sandstone walls which ghast-down skull-like on the scene beneath, we lodge a moment from the heaviest drench and find tin-lids dropped by kids or fishermen.
The Birding Guide says we can walk (occasionally passing canoe-trees, we discover) all the way up to the Den of Nargun. Wrong:- 'Private Land. This is Not the Park. Keep Out! No Entry. No Warnings Given.' And this un-Australian denizen fenced (beyond his own electric field-boundary) river access off to the very brink with a log construction. No doubt he'd say it was to stop cows wandering, since flood-line and below's crown land.
Tempted to dismantle... but... anyway, the inch-long ants that traipse these paths may pass unhindered as lawyers' letters.
