Down South Musings

Small writings from a mini Journal I purchased in Hopetoun.

Hellfire Bay, Esperence. 15-07-2025

Mostly sand, a small collection of walkable rocks huddle under a boulder hill like nuggets of gold. The waves bash against them like they did in hopetoun, but with the backdrop of pure white beaches, flat green hills, and coral bay blue water it seems so insignificant and non-defining.
The foam hits one rock hard, and foam struggles with occasional success to encompass it. Then like a milk frot it streams through the semi-channel gaps and laps at the stones behind it.
It is all dunes except the one big rock I’m sitting on. Placed like a decided building rather than element. As if it chose here irrespective of biome because it wanted to be here, by the bay.

Shelly Cove, Down South. 24-08-2025

Sanding on top of sour grass, leaning on old trees martyred along the shores like a cruel mimic of mangroves, below stumble pale, colourless rocks made vivid by looping laps of ocean water. Stretched along my site is beach and trees in a curve seen by sight and satelite. Tasteful are the holiday houses littered so randomly along the shallow hills here. I wonder if the people who stay there are air headed appreciators of such aesthetic luxury or too caught up in their own thougnts and affairs to see such land as more than a mere backdrop to their tasks. I know I am.

Shelly Cove, Down South. 24-08-2025

greenery, shrub, and trees, to my mind they are all supremely alike. The uncanny unfamiliar does not happen at the whole of the unit. The entire tree, sections of scrub, is wholly and entirely samey. in macroscope there’s that sense of difference, the offness to the norm. Different places just feel “different” via the biome. The true knowledge of change comes in the collection of details under directed view. The wet thick spiked tips of a moisture filled plant a step above the lawn in length, or the moss upon the pale red rocks.

A shallow cave, Down South. 24-08-2025

Everything in shaped gradient, hills slop incrementally as though they follow vertex points. Down to the beach, where boulers and sand stand in equal measure foam forms a formidable border between the ocean and flat stoned beach. The smattering of rocks jutting their attempt a two dimentional map of a deadly cliffside and its crishing conditions below. Part of me wonders how hard it would be to model this place, for such tumultuous and unfriendly waters poked out sternly, there’s something simple and smooth about its layout.

2 Mile Beach, Hopetoun. 19-09-2025

I cannot sit still, yet I have not moved. This cycle of worry and complacenecy concocts a vibration deflecting my own self assesment. There are mud skippers here, most are small and beige, some are bigger .Skinny catfish, black with a willy wags anxious and skirting speed. Such erratic and uncomfortable rhythms that give me a safe and solace. They are the most energetic trapped creature I’ve known, flightly little bids in the slips of beached rock.

The snails

Lethargic laneways in swirls of road who by grace of length are saved from the moniker “blotchy”. There are small roads, made by snails with shells like elephant skin. How little their labour looks, how loved and sophisticated or deranged they seem to those with eyes to realise and imagine.

Barrens Beach, Fitzgerald River National Park. 20-09-2025

Of all the things that seep sanguine thoughts at the silty sand of beaches, where scrub, shell, and smooth rock mingle in changing array, it is the sandcastles and bush cubbies that can be built. So barren and meagre is the development of lands edge. Colour, texture, sound and sense are the backdrop of my gut-lifting focus on creating realms of rusable comfort, everlasting features of safety and sanctuary, however meagre and fleeting it could be.

East Miley Beach.

The rocks jutt out at the tip of the beach. 5 fingered fingernails, sharp claws of a dexterous biomic beast. So hard are the embedding of grey rising between that fleshy burial of sand, which curves beziar between each stony claw, like ends of a starfish sharing a shurikans sharpness.