Cradle Mountain

Dear S.K. There’s a picture of Cradle Mountain on the television. Cradle makes me feel a bit sentimental. You are right; Cradle Mountain does call you back. Remember how I had commented how different it was when I walked around Dove Lake and climbed the Cradle forty years before with my family and friends. We only met about half a dozen people that day and this time there was almost a constant line of walkers from one end to the other. Ah, me, progress!          

But back at Waldheim I remember when I stood on the verge of the tree line looking out across the valley, waiting for you to finish your shower, just how isolated it could be. The tourists had all gone back to their comfy hotels and motels - the Overland Track hikers all gone - heading south towards Lake St Claire. It seemed like we were the only ones left in the world. Certainly, we were the only ones left in Waldheim.          

Remember how there had been a brief storm before you went off to those so inadequate shower rooms. The storm left a kind of rosy light behind. It infused everything, the huts and the trees behind me; the valley in front, it all glowed as if lit by unseen lanterns. It looked like it was millions of years old. I could have imagined giant marsupials down there in that valley, reining supreme. Sure, the single weather-greyed wooden walkway was there, but so integral was it with its surrounds it was - or could have just been, part of the general configuration. 

Then there was a movement in front and I saw this fat old orange-tinged wombat coming out of the ferns to grab a quick snack before dark. I walked right up to it and it just lifted its head, blinked and went back to chewing. Okay, I said, don’t talk, you’re a midget compared with what I have just imagined. You wouldn’t think that a fat old wombat could be so stuck up, would you? The wombat still ignored me and went on chomping. 

It was then I saw on the side of the distant mountain, a slow moving patch of red in the losing light coming down the slope. Curiously enough such a sight didn’t impose on the vast emptiness all around. It was like the present also needed to be recognised and in its own strange way it added, rather than subtracted, from the emptiness. And curiously enough in retrospect, that touch of alien colour reminded me of some of those white figure drawings you do on a black background. The ones where you had given a touch of alien colour to the faces of the otherwise blank fingers. There was a similarity. Something to do with minimalism, I suspect.          

And by the way, I ran into Bob Brown at his photo exhibition in the Salamanca Gallery some time back and commented to him that one of the photos he took must have been taken at almost the same spot that I just described. I told him how I felt about that lone returning hiker. How alien in such emptiness. He told me that he remembered taking the photo well, because just after he‘d taken the shot he heard in the distance the sound of a dog baying in hunting mode.How strange! Who what or how? 

I looked back at his photo and it suddenly seemed a little flatter than it had been a few seconds before. I sometimes think in my more fanciful moments that photos need more than just an unmoving description of the past, they are too flat; they need audio or movement to bring them to full life. But then, they wouldn’t be photos would they. They’d be something else. They’d be being there!