A new type of seaweed, I thought. Black – I haven’t seen this here before. But it isn’t seaweed, washed up on the beach this morning. It’s ash. We’re 25km south of the fire that has just ravaged over 70,000 hectares of forest between Batemans Bay and Bawley Point, where I first lived when I moved to the coast. I drove 35km through that forest every weekday for 6 months. But the numbers don’t add up. The forest is dead. The buildings are protected, the human homes saved. But the trees are gone and with them the nests, the birds and the insects, the lizards and wombats, the life. And its dust is washed up on the tides, carried away by the ocean, deposited here to let us all be reminded – a great fire is coming and we are all in line.
At first it looked just like seaweed …
I’ve gotten used to the Shearwater carcasses lining the shoreline by now. But this is new – a colourful parrot, strewn across the beach, and then a magpie. Charred by the fires and thrown into the waters, to be spewed up here by the ocean. We can only imagine the horror of its last moments, its world incinerated by a monstrous explosion of fire, its feathers burning crisp as it crashed into a death spiral and the waves below.
There have always been fires, like floods and droughts, in Australia. But the ferocity, the intensity, the extent of their devastation is new. This is what scientists warned us about 20 years ago and this is what fire chiefs reiterate now. Now we reap what we sow. Centuries of farming for what we could get, on this land, and millennia of profiteering across the globe, behind it. The relentless logic of capitalism, built out of the greed that drove colonisation since the age of agriculture began, turbo boosted by the machine age of industrialisation and now the exponential skywards march of the digital age. Straight up, go the growth figures; and straight back down, they will come. This is timeless wisdom, dressed up as prediction, made easy by the stupidity of our ‘leaders’.
I still swim in the salty sea waters I love. The ash isn’t too bad once you’re in. The scent is off-putting, though; not as bad as burnt hair, but a whiff of death is in the air for sure. The sun glows an eery red but the surfers are still out too, looking for a wave. I still go to work. Life goes on. But it’s changing, this year, and it’s going to keep on getting worse while we fail to face, let alone act on, the realities of anthropogenic climate change. The crisis is washing up on our shores, just as it is lapping at the feet of the Pacific Islanders, melting glaciers, extending deserts and torching even rainforests. While our ignorant PM waffles on about the cricket and anything but the emergency, the only ashes that matter this summer are already here.
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I’ve always felt that the world is alive and aware of us. It’s almost as if, as a child, i could feel intelligence in the sand, on the breeze, soaking the earth with rain and pushing up out of the soil as plant life. Thankfully, i’ve never outgrown this feeling.
But lately i’ve been wondering how the world would feel, if it were able to sing? What came to me, after spending copious hours on the beaches of south coast NSW, was a set of lyrics that expressed anger and frustration at the endless stupidity of the human race, as well as love for self and all, wrapped up in a sound that could best be communicated in rollicking, rocking, big electronic sounds inspired by the punk DIY ethic, the industrial nature of modern society, the grunge explosion and everything in between. This seemed like the kind of music that could carry my lyrics of dark ecomysticism and cutting social commentary; especially when i was lucky enough to be able to record such songs with incredible musicians capable of improvising their own way around this sonic scape of mythic dimensions.
That band is called SEVERINS. And lo, they do rock, my friends, they surely do. The forthcoming album is titled RECONNECT.
The first song in this set is called “What The Ocean Feels“. The lyrics are inspired by the oceanic shorelines i live and breathe every day. I wrote some of the words watching them, some diving into them, some while underwater, and some while running alongside them. These words spring freely out of the foamy waves crashing upon the beach, just as Aphrodite is constantly reborn, just as the white-maned horses of the sea god thunder down upon our shores, writhing in passionate embrace of their elemental existence, celebrating what they are without limit, destined to rejoin their kin in the sky even as they rise from the depths of The Ocean to greet us on land. The Ocean wants us to love it, to revere it, as the home and great regenerative fount of life … but it is angry, it is roiling over as it also must spew forth the rubbish we dispense upon its beauty, which rolls out of the rivers and despoils It. Please listen to it sing, give thanks to The Ocean, and share the love as widely as possible.
I feel a little tug on my heart, as i find this creek running into the sea in Tathra today. It is the first time it has made it this far since i started staying here regularly a few years ago. Today is exactly one year since the devastating bushfires in this seaside community, so there was a lot of resilience and reconnection to celebrate, as well as a lot to remember in mourning. Recently it was also the 10 year anniversary of the Kinglake bushfires, which at the time shocked the world with their unassailable ferocity and loss of life, both human and non-human. My brother lost his property that day, but he narrowly escaped with his life, along with his wife and 1-year old son. Life is creation and destruction, birth and death, shut down and break through all the time.
But today, seeing this little creek making its way out to sea made my heart glad. So often it’s the subtle touches of nature connection that can make a difference to the way we feel; and, more importantly, to the way we act. Continuing to work with this foundation of ecopsychology (or ecospirituality) enables us to tune in to our part in the more-than-human life that we are part of. We’ve changed the world and damaged its fabric in this new era of the Anthropocene and, as a race, we haven’t yet proven able to pull out of the slippery slope of materialistic capitalism and take better care of our planetary home.
So why celebrate such a small matter today? Because the stream made it, the flow created breakthrough, and some days our hearts hurt and we need to be reminded that this is the ancient way of life. We take what we think we need and sometimes this is too much and we do damage. Then, we need to let the waters flow, to give away and to give back. Sure, it is natural for us to want to draw fresh water from a sparkling stream; to be refreshed by its soothing qualities and to give thanks for its gifts. But this is not what the military/industrial complex is doing. It offers engineering infrastructure to suck the rivers dry, to create mega-dams and turn the taps onto crops of cotton and rice and whatever else are doused in the chemicals designed and pushed by Big Pharma, to be sold and controlled according to the machinations of predatory capitalism. We all know this, but it is proving to be a ‘wicked problem’, to dislodge the machine and allow the earth to regrow from beneath such withering machinations and their shadow.
I grew up in Port Adelaide, which meant that my school holidays were spent on local beaches, in the desert fringes of the Flinders Ranges, down the Fleurieu Peninsula and along the Might Murray River. I always felt deep kinship with the salty sands and gentle dunes along my friendly beachfronts, and was never quite so much at home along the river, with its spooky dead trees in places, and its steady one-way flow. But then i visited the Coorong for the first time, and my heart sang for the river and the sea at the same time.
The Coorong in South Australia, where the Murray River meets the sea – sometimes.
Here, when i was a kid, a mighty river flowed into the sea, with much of its overflow captured in salty lakes and lagoons surrounded by my favourite landscape feature of all, the sand dune. There were mysteriously quiet coves, dead flat crystalline beds of salt, endless blue skies and crashing oceanic waves on the other side of a fragile dune system. It was many years before i would learn why the Murray stopped flowing into the sea, how the river mouth was closed up and the inland lake system dying. The story of criminal irrigators stealing vast quantities of fresh water upstream, in other states of Australia, is now coming further into the light, as the tragedy of millions of dead native fish hits the headlines and the public become outraged at the stupidity and recklessness of the ‘system’ again. It’s no coincidence that the remote communities mostly affected are largely Aboriginal, while it is wealthy industrial farmers (not the caring smaller scale ones) that profit. Again.
Local fish death tragedy, Wallagoot Lake, caused by low water levels, drought and heat.
The fish death phenomenon is largely out of the 24/7 spectacle of news media already, although it has just hit home (albeit on a smaller scale, thank goodness) in our local area. Since then, we have enjoyed a dense bank of rain such as we haven’t seen around here in ages. It’s been sweet to fall asleep to the sound of raindrops on the roof – and maybe even to wake up to it too. And so, this little creek flows into the sea. Something seems right about this; something we have missed. Like so many of the symptoms of the runaway climate destruction we are now witnessing, it’s as if part of our souls have been splintered away, as the earth groans under the weight of modern industrial capital and its inevitable commodification and degradation of every ‘resource’ it can get its greedy hands on.
In ancient Mesopotamia, the place where the two waters – fresh and salty – mingled was renowned as a place of fertility. Many Aboriginal Australians know the same truth; that such places are rich and should be protected. Rivers are meant to run and we should take their fresh water for use and not for greed. If they don’t make it to the sea for too long a period, death follows. It’s just another ancient law we ignore at our peril. Long live the spirit of flow and letting go and allowing for breakthrough, both in our fragile environment and in our souls – which end up being the same place, when we open our minds and bodies to our place in nature.
