In the dunes

http://www.dailywriting.net/RearMirror.htm

I looked into the rear view mirror at my life.   Kaleidoscopic images of past moments swirled around me.  Outside the summer air was heavy with dusty scent of melaleucas.  Ocean sounds on a relaxation CD swished through my mind.  A memory of a sea breeze seemed to caress my face and I felt myself to be sitting beside my oldest daughter on an aboriginal midden on Australia’s south east coast.

We had walked out along a wild surf beach late one afternoon.  She dawdled through the shallows while I rambled along on the sand stopping every so often to examine sea shells and fragments of driftwood.  The light was golden.  Suddenly I swerved off into the dunes obeying some instinct that didn’t have a name.  My daughter followed.

I led us up over the first line of dunes that lined the coast, wandered along a hollow between the sand ridges and then climbed up to the crest of a wide dune.  I sat down and looked around.  “It’s a midden,” said my daughter and squatted down beside me.  Sure enough there were the tell tale signs.  Circular areas of blackened sand and charcoal indicated still the places where fires had last burned over a hundred and fifty years ago.  Scattered all around were fragments of whitened bone fragments and scraps of shells.  Perhaps it was our imagination but we both felt we heard the low murmur of women’s voices burbling in some tongue we did not know.  Gentle laughter seemed to wash around us.  Looking out from that spot we could see how the rocks formed a low platform that acted as a breakwater.  Inside this barrier the water was calm and shallow – a perfect spot to hunt for shellfish and go spear fishing at low tide.

The midden would have been used by the Bunurong people, a small tribe of coastal aboriginals who had inhabited that part of the coast before white people arrived.   The tribe was all but wiped out by smallpox carried by the sealers and whalers who visited those shores  early in the nineteenth century.  Middens are scattered through the dunes right along that shore line but they are hard to find.  Unlike the surfers and boating enthusiasts who now frequent the area, the aboriginals did not congregate around the harbours, safe swimming spots and the places where the waves break in long, rolling, predictable swells.  Instead they sought out the shallow lagoons behind the dunes and the spots where the rock formations created natural fishing holes.

As we sat there, my daughter and I, we talked about how we both felt the deep calm that seemed always to pervade the middens we had discovered.  The time that rolled around us was counted in millennia not decades and the stories that whispered in the wind told of endless comings and goings, goings and comings back and back and back to the very dawn of human life.

Now as I look to back to see my daughter and I sitting there I realise it must have been a year or two before she went to away to university, then overseas to marriage and her own time of mothering in a foreign land on the other side of the globe.  If I’d known then that I was to see her so rarely in the future, would I have hung onto the moment tighter? Would my experience be better because I had clutched at it?  No, I don’t think so.  It was perfect just how it was.  We were both fully inside the experience.  There was no part of my mind that was not fully involved in the moment.  Time  winding back and back and back enfolded us and we became part of the comings and goings, the goings and comings of humanity.

posted by Suzanne