Tom M. Wilson

I’m sitting in a cafe in Bellingen, a small country town on the Belliger River in north-east N.S.W. This morning I paddled a kayake with my friend James up the Belliger River, and as I did so I remembered Peter Carey’s novel Oscar and Lucinda, the final scenes of which are set on this river. Oscar is taking a church made of glass up the river on a barge to Bellingen. The year is around 1880, and the town he is trying to take this church to is one of the first pioneering town’s outside Sydney. Oscar is an idealist and a dreamer and the impracticality of these attributes in the Australian wilderness is represented by the heat pounding down upon him as he sits inside the now cracking glass house by himself. As the barge moves up the river Carey talks of how the white colonists saw only looming trees and failed to percieve that the land about them was thick with stories and myths, belonging to the Aboriginal culture. This morning as I pushed my way up the river with my paddle I didn’t even see banks thick with trees: in 2007 the banks of this river are mainly cleared for cattle. Oscar dies in this place, and this great Australian novel ends with a fatalistic view of white settlement on this continent. But throughout the final pages of the novel, and the final scenes of the film of the same name, I think the beauty of this part of the central east coast of Australia comes through.

This is Dorrigo National Park, just up the hill from where I sit and write this in Bellingen.

The subtropical rainforest, beneath the canopy. The central east coast rainforest reserves of Australia are the largest areas of subtropical rainforest on earth.

The humidity in the forest is very high, and the air is cool as we’re at about 800 metres.

I can say that my time in these hills was happier than Oscar’s.

The other day I was in the belly of a wooden whale: standing in the burnt out core of an ancient tingle with my friend Sunny, looking out like Jonah from the beast. Being here with food, fire, friend, trees, sky, birds, winds, colds, warm suns, being here with the basic elements is good for the soul I’m sure. No advertising to spin you off course. No texting mobile phones to chop up your minutes. No errant knaves, just the knaves of wooden chapels, like the tingle I’m standing within and looking out from the triangular entrance. Sunny wandered off from the tingle, but I stayed within, looking closely at the breaches in the trunk where light and spiders webs coalesced.

All of a sudden the sound of Sunny’s bamboo pipe echoed through the Valley of the Giants. The high and delicate notes came to my ears through the maze of green leaves and came muffled by the wooden buttresses to my sides, but they came as if from the loci genus, the spirit of the place.

This morning I’m leaving Western Australia. My recent time in the forests of the south (where I took some new photographs which have been added to my gallery) was a bidding farewell to this place. I’m about to travel around the world, going today to Coffs Harbour, and then to New Zealand on Tuesday, and hence Samoa, North America, Europe, Bali and back to Perth. I’m going to put some of the dates of my travels on the front welcome page of this website if you’re interested.

Along the way I’ll be updating this blog, when I get the chance.

I’m about to go to some strange places, but everywhere I go I feel that the biosphere is my home.

Clive Hamilton has been busy digging up the truth on the Howard government’s self-serving response to climate change. He has just published a book in which he brings the truth to the surface. I heard him talk last Wednesday at UWA in Perth.

If you didn’t manage to get your hands on the book or get to a lecture, you can hear Hamilton talk at the University of Sydney a couple of weeks ago.

My favourite quote from the talk: What do you call a climate change sceptic’s think tank? A sceptic tank.

Nuf said.