A walk in the bush

After a family picnic, I had a lovely walk in the bush in Kuring-Gai Chase National Park in Sydney’s north recently. It’s a funny word, ‘bush’. While it can be used to refer to a single small plant (such as a rose bush), in Australia it usually means something else, most likely an area of native plants that hasn’t been cultivated, and so is slightly chaotic. It also sometimes just means ‘not the city’ … one lives in the city or in the bush. And when someone ‘goes bush’, they’ve left the civilised parts and probably no-one quite knows to where they’ve gone.

It took us a long time in Australia to appreciate our bush. While Indigenous people always knew and loved it, we more recent immigrants were firstly besotted with the stereotypical views of the countryside of European painters. If you wander in an Australian art gallery, you’ll find landscapes early in the 19th century that could have been painted in Europe (but weren’t). Then late in the nineteenth century, we started to see the world differently and the Australian Impressionists, among others, captured the beauty that is the Australian bush.

Dorothea MacKellar captured this beautifully in her iconic poem (written in England), My Country. (If you’re not familiar with this, her short and iconic poem is at http://www.dorotheamackellar.com.au/archive/mycountry.htm and well worth a read. As children, we learnt it as a song, too, “I love a sunburnt country …” It is still the best description of how different our bush is from the English countryside (which is lovely, but in a different way). [It also deals with more than just the bush like Kuring-Gai Chase National Park.]

I enjoyed the lovely colours and the sunlight on trees and grasses and rocks, and the wild lack of order (such as you will find in a plantation). The grass trees looked especially spectacular. (We used to call them blackboy trees when I was a kid, but that is no longer appropriate.) Here are a few snaps, but I could have taken many more. You can click on them to see more, if you wish.

When you look a bit closer, there are all sorts of plants there, including a few flowers as well. It got me thinking how wonderful it must have seemed to a botanist like Joseph Banks in the early days of European insurgence into Australia, seeing so many plants that were familiar – but not quite – a whole continent full of new plants! Of course, the closer you look, the more visible is the mathematics … with the fractal-like ferns and the L-systems …

The Kuring-Gai Chase National Park is on the edge of northern Sydney, and so easily accessible. We were lucky on the day we visited that the picnic area was comparatively quiet, as everyone was at school or at work. So it was easy to find a table and enjoy the environment. I thoroughly enjoyed the family picnic, remembering many other family picnics, and also loved the light on the trees in the picnic grounds.

There was water around, with a river wandering off to the Pacific Ocean somewhere and also a lot of mudflats, with mangrove trees exposed for now by a lower tide. To get to a boardwalk and a walk in the bush, we had to cross a footbridge; somehow it seems OK to interrupt the bush with things like footbridges and boardwalks, as it gives us all safe access to it.

As we walked on the boardwalk, lots of little crabs popped back into their holes, waiting until we passed. This made it pretty hard to photograph them, but I caught this little guy enjoying the sunshine, and being a bit more daring than his (or her) companions:

We encountered some other wildlife as well, including a bush turkey and a bird. The bush turkey was determined to not be photographed, and kept popping into shaded bits of bush. It’s funny how things that are new to us are interesting, but the familiar is easily ignored. My companions were puzzled that I was fascinated with a bush turkey of the kind that they saw every day. I suppose that visitors to Australia are fascinated with kangaroos, koalas and emus in the same way. The unfamiliar is more interesting than the familiar!

Taking a walk in the bush is probably less fun when it’s cloudy or raining, but we were lucky to have glorious sunshine, which made some of the trees stand out beautifully:

It’s nice to have the bush so close to the city and I felt very lucky to have the time to go for a walk, and family to enjoy a picnic with, without worrying about the next deadline.