Coochiemudlo

A friend and her partner are in the process of buying a house on a small island just off the coast of Brisbane--Coochiemudlo.

This sign explains the Indigenous origins of the Island's name. (Click to enlarge).

Today, and last Friday, I was lucky enough to be invited along for a trip to the island, as R- anticipates her new home and small community lifestyle.

It was an invitation I jumped at because it presented the opportunity for a kind of power holiday. To be able to visit a quiet island beach seemed just the salve I needed for my recently tired and emotional state; and Coochie is only a 50 minute drive and a short ferry trip away from where I currently live.

Coochiemudlo isn't a particularly large island, but on our first visit we were surprised to find we hadn't covered nearly as much of the island as we'd thought on our wanderings.

After brunch at a cafe near the ferry dock, we had walked away from that beach around to Norfolk Beach, where Matthew Flinders had landed.


We'd taken a trek through a Melaleuca forest.


We'd spent plenty of time swimming in the ocean and kayaking on the smooth seas.


But it turns out we hadn't even covered a quarter of the island!

Today we went back to Coochiemudlo, determined to see the ochre for which it was renowned by Aboriginal tribes in the region. And we thought we might attempt to walk around the island too.

All was going well until we encountered these steps, just one of the many structures built by Douglas Morton on the island.


Morton also built this jetty. It was at the bottom of the steps, amongst the mangroves and today seemed to lead into the mangroves' reclaimed territory.


I think we were lucky it was low tide when we were wandering around. Later we saw evidence of more jetties and bathing enclosures.


To get here we walked past a community golf course and building, and then more old-fashioned wrought steps.


As you've no doubt deduced, we had finally encountered the ochre on the island.

To me, it seemed to be the texture of Cray-Pas: hard, but soft enough to be scraped away with my finger nail in a smooth, dense paste.

I fancied that the various holes on the surface of the rock were places where Indigenous people from long ago had scraped out the ochre they required.


Of course, I'm not sure I can discount the effects of the sea and tides on the texture of the surface.


Eventually, we left the ochre behind us and made our way back to the beach near the jetty.


It was only when we got off the ferry and back to the Brisbane side of the bay that we looked at a map and, once again, realised we'd covered less than a quarter of the island.

While we were surprised at our lack of ability to judge the distances we had wandered, we weren't at all disappointed to have more of the island to discover another day.

Indeed, it seems there's a whole other beach to explore...

Lush Life

This is the view from the kitchen door this morning:


That is all.

An Australian Hallowe'en

Or more pumpkins and some skulls

The pumpkins just didn't stop at Jimbour. And they seemed to pose just perfectly for as many $5 poster shots as I could muster.


Almost as numerous as the pumpkins were the bones of long dead cattle.


Most especially the skulls.


Old wagon wheels also seemed to vie for supremacy. But in this instance, for me, I don't think these old spokes quite trumped the sight of that leg bone in the foreground.


The old stables had displays inside telling of the history of the property.


This building was the original homestead, and was once a two story structure, but was forcibly remodelled after a fire. (More shades of The White Earth). Then, if I recall correctly, it became the accommodation for the property's workers. You can't really see it in this picture, but the blue stone from which it was built is quite beautiful.


Here's a closer look at the stone, along with a plaque that tells you of the transfers of ownership at Jimbour:


The newer homestead has itself undergone some extensive renovations, which are still in progress. This is the back of the house. That balcony doesn't look particularly safe to walk on.


The house will be even more impressive when it's fully restored. It's still a private residence, just as the property is still a working property, even if the focus is now on wine production, so there probably won't be much opportunity to do a tour of the interior for quite some time.

Garden Retreat

As noted in the last post, there was a fairly impressive herb and vegetable garden at Jimbour, which visitors were encouraged to wander through.

Just flicking through the photos I took, I can see that I don't really have one that takes it in as a whole. This is probably the best I can do, looking back towards the big house:


In spite of the overcast skies, it's obviously still pretty dry in the area. Perhaps the best marker of that is the fairly slim looking bottle tree at the centre of the garden. Here's a closer look:


They tend to get fatter when there's more water to hold in their trunks. Although, maybe it's just a younger tree, since this one, below, which was along the path to the big house, seems to be holding it's shape quite comfortably.


But back to the centre-piece of the enclosed garden. I couldn't resist taking these $5 poster shots of the pumpkins that formed the boundary of the centre-piece.

Brace yourself for even more pumpkins a bit further on. Pumpkin soup was a key feature of the kitchen menu, so it was rather nice to see they were using the local produce.


I think I would characterise these next couple of shots as a bit Sidney Nolan in the sense of looking for figures to put in the landscape. (Did you groan out loud at that? I'm still a bit flushed from going to see Sidney Nolan: A New Retrospective at the Art Gallery yesterday. I hope you'll forgive such a clunky attempt to work that in. More on Sidney Nolan another day. Back to Jimbour).



It seems the garden wasn't so much of a retreat from death in a bygone era as I had anticipated. Still, these photos give you some more sense of the scale of the garden. Beyond the garden there were various stables and old buildings, as well as an aeroplane hanger, because there's a landing strip at Jimbour too.


Perhaps I didn't need to locate figures in the landscape as much as I thought. I think the sight of these vegetable growing is intrinsically of interest:


Don't these vegetables just make your heart glad?


I confess to experiencing beetroot envy when I saw these:


I think this post might be getting a bit long, especially with all the photos. It looks like the tour of the out buildings and even more pumpkins will have to comprise another post. Meanwhile, let me leave all the poultry lovers out there with this lovely vision, tucked away on the outskirts of the garden, which clearly they're not allowed to maraud:


Next: An Australian Hallowe'en

Haunted Housekeeping

It's been three months since I promised to post photos about the trip back from the Bunya Mountains. The moment may well have passed, and it isn't as if those posts I've linked to elicited any kind of discernible reaction, but since it was such a lovely trip back, via the Jimbour Estate Winery, and I'm not one to waste a mobile phone photo, well I've decided to make a record of it here for myself. (Sometimes I wonder what will happen if Blogger ever goes belly up; they will take these years of my life with them).

Upon arriving at the Jimbour Estate, this is the first building we encountered. I think it's a converted mill tower, but I can't really remember. Anyway, this is where we tasted some wines, and where the kitchen was, from which we ordered lunch.


As we walked down a tree-lined path towards the main house there was this church. I did take some photos inside but it was fairly non-descript in a strictly Protestant way.

This sign pays homage to Ludwig Leichhardt for whom Jimbour Station served as the last outpost of civilisation before he went off on one of his explorations. I thought of Voss when I saw this sign, but I'm not sure if it was actually the point of Leichhardt's last hurrah.

Here is the Jimbour Station house. I have to credit one of my friends for making me think of The White Earth, which we read at bookclub. After the thoughts about Voss, the thoughts about decrepit, crumbling station house of The White Earth, which was set in this area, just made everything seem creepier, or rather just unbearably sad and haunted.


Next to come into view was this magnificent pool. Another of my travelling companions informed me that this was the pool from the mini-series, Return to Eden, starring Wendy Hughes and James Reyne. I remember watching it as an early teenager, so that just added crocodile attacks to the haunted atmosphere.


And as if that wasn't enough to make us all jumpy, then the information that back in the station's heyday they used the bottle trees for target practise ensured a quick retreat to the expansive vegetable garden nearby.


Next: Garden Retreat.

Take A Picture

Amber has asked everyone to take picture of themselves right now.

She's attached these rules:

Take a picture of yourself right now
Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair
Just take the picture
Post the picture with no editing
Post these instructions with your picture

Now if Amber told me to jump off a cliff, you should know that I wouldn't. But I'm feeling a bit suggestible right now. And I have a lap top with a camera:

Other Flora of the Bunya Mountains

On the second day in the Bunya Mountains we went for a really long walk--about four hours in total--along the tracks in the National Park:

Somewhere along the way I read a sign that spoke about the different kinds of forest in the Bunya Mountains.  And so it did keep changing as we went along.  When we started out the ground was covered in these ferns:

One of the friends I went with to the Bunyas had a keen eye for the surroundings.  He pointed out this twisted trunk, describing it as reptilian:

As one might expect, there were a lot of staghorns in the forest.  Some were perched up in trees, while others were not quite so firm in their grip: 

I'm not sure that these mobile photographs have managed to capture the full glory of the colours of the various lichens and fungi we encountered on the trees in the forest, living and otherwise.  This fungus was a series of rainbows in orange, cream, and brown:

 

There truly were some glorious, yet delicate shapes too:  

This fungi reminded me very much of the dried wood fungus I sometimes use in Asian recipes, after it's been reconstituted.  Given that they were growing on a tree, I don't think my supposition was too outlandish--still, I wasn't going to risk it:

Here are some more instances of the different kinds of forest that we came across, all within quite short distances of one another.  What was extraordinary was how isolated these spots of completely different foliage were.  For only a short distance, in a gully, there was a copse of these large-leaved elephant-ear plants: 

Then there were these grassy patches amidst the various types of forests which were called 'balds'.  Apparently these are indicative of a much colder climate once upon a time.  Again signs explained that the local Aboriginal people had once managed these areas, control burning them to stop the forest encroaching.  Now, of course, the forest is slowly invading these grasslands:

This photo was taken the day before, but it seemed to me that this vegetation was quite similar to that in those areas that led into the balds: 

It was in this kind of forest that  we came across another copse of trees the next day, this time grass trees, a sprinkling of them just in one spot:  

And finally, I thought I'd show you this, because it was a pretty spectacular sight to come across.  It made me think about when the tree fell; I'm glad I wasn't around for any kind of Judy moment.  But the sight of that broken trunk lying there also made me think that it would soon be covered with fungi, delicate and fecund, of the kind we had seen along our walk.  Soon it would disintegrate back into the forest to nourish the ground where once it had flourished.