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| The elaborate portico of Thomas Austin's Barwon Park homestead near Winchelse, on Victoria's basalt plain. It was from Barwon Park that rabbits began their invasion of Australia. |
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| Photo by Graeme Kinross-Smith. |
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| 'I remember how the ground opened to my lens at Mount Noorat, and how the chill came into the wind as the shadows crept over the plain below.' |
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| Photo by Graeme Kinross-Smith, 1999. |
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I like staying still every now and then, so that the whole volcanic plain pauses around me.
I stop the car and look and listen and smell. I think how this relates to that. I think where things and places are across the plain and what they are like at different times of day, in different lights. I remember things I've read, things people have told me. I remember photographs and paintings of the plain that I've seen. I recall photographs I've taken of it, how I took them, what things were like around me when I pressed the shutter button. I remember how the ground opened to my lens at Mount Noorat, and how the chill came into the wind as the shadows crept over the plain below.
I remember journeys I've made across the plain. Sometimes I drive in fog, sometimes in a heat that slams the windows of the car, often in driving rain, sometimes in bushfire smoke, sometimes down avenues of frost, the frozen grass running blue into the shadows away from the road. And yet for every journey the lava plain is beneath my feet, my wheels, and time is travelling beside me.
I am standing still under the big cypresses at Barwon Park homestead near Winchelsea. Already I'm going back, back. I'm thinking about Thomas Austin, who built this grand mansion in the early 1870s. Most of the Sunday visitors have gone. The sun is low. It's the end of autumn. I look slowly around the horizon, my eyes taken along, then stopped by the rises in the land's hips and flanks and shoulders, then taken along again. I realise that from his front portico Thomas Austin must often have seen the sunset painting the peak of Mt Moriac in rose light towards Geelong to the east, where I live now. I suddenly feel a human connection in time and place. I see what Thomas Austin sees, and yet there are 130 years between us. The lava plain pauses and stands still around me.
Now I am much further west down the plain. I am climbing Mount Elephant, up, up with the hawks hovering over me in the winter wind. The steep slope cuts diagonally across the view of the plains to the east, cutting down, down to my tiny truck at a sheep gate. I climb from sheep track to sheep track. The ground begins to heel over, the mossed basalt starts to throw different shadows, the wind beats up into the sky, the hawks hover, dive, hover. I reach the spine and stand on the rim. I look into a crater 90 metres deep. I am standing on the huge, tawny flanks of a jaguar. To the east are the little houses of the town of Derrinallum clutching the volcano's foot. Tonight the moonlight will creep down into the crater. I will not be here to witness it. I know there is always more magic.
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| Birregurra Creek as seen from the highway between Geelong and Colac. Like many Australian watercourses Birregurra is dry in summer but a haven for birdlife in the wet season. |
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| Photo by Graeme Kinross-Smith. |
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The volcanic plain has truths. It doesn't advertise them: it just leaves them waiting for you. I have learnt to look out when I am driving over Birregurra Creek on the highway from Geelong to Colac. This gentle watercourse is like a ready rain-gauge. In a wet season it is wide below the bridge, the swans and ibis, pelicans and cranes beetling in the air to land upon it. Yet in a dry summer it is parched and cracking, prospected by desiccated-looking sheep. It's a small truth, a small tribute to seasonal change, a small sign from the plain.
Copyright Imagine The Future Inc. and Australian Film Commission, 2002.
Text by Graeme Kinross-Smith for ITF.
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