The casuarina forest - Page 5
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 2: Dreams of Land
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Matthew Condon
The mysticism of the she-oaks relates to the Tahitians, who believe that they arose from the warriors who died in battle, killed by clubs or spears made from its very hard wood. The warriors' hair became the foliage and their blood oozed forth once more as the red sap.
THE DEEPER YOU ENTER THE FOREST the warmer it gets. The trees are so effective as a windbreak you can look down towards the beach from the narrow path and see gusts levelling the surf and children flying kites, and yet inside the forest it is still.
When I run through the forest I ask myself why I am here, back on the Gold Coast. Have I been trying to reclaim a landscape of my imagination? An infrastructure that has long since dissolved?
Or is it an attempt to puncture the past and inhabit a childhood that was sweet and simple and riven with the swift jade-coloured currents of Tallebudgera Creek, and brilliant stars at night, and family sitting in a circle like a strong and unbreakable human wheel on summer nights, the air as thick with sandflies and moths as stories and laughter.
It is the strongest reality I have of the Gold Coast. The lantern slides inside a child's mind. The sound of those blocks of ice hurtling down wooden runners. The hothouse of shower blocks at the caravan park. My grandparents alive. My parents young and happy. My sister's hair bleached by the surf and sun. Napping under the casuarina trees, their tiny cones indenting my skin even through a towel.
Was it magical, too, because it was a place you just visited, yet felt you knew like your own home? Just like you know the smell of someone? I never knew the Gold Coast because there was nothing to know. It is a place you visit. What it becomes is the memory of that visit. And millions of people have visited and have their own memories, and that is what the Gold Coast is. A huge, unending, ever-expanding mosaic of memories. The biggest photograph album in the country.
It is, too, a corridor of flux. Out beyond the breakers, along the 36 kilometres of beach, there is the current that sweeps by like a highway, full of fish and seaweed and sometimes the bodies of drowned swimmers. And on the mainland there are the highways too, parallel to the beach, sweeping people in and out in constant currents.
It is why you meet yoga gurus who used to be property developers, and property developers who used to be waiters, and waiters who used to be yoga gurus. It is why you can have living next door to you four Swedish men who are here to surf for a year. And computer experts from California living around the corner. And English-born Tibetan scholars setting up a teakfurniture business in Southport.
Running through the forest, you think of all these things. Halfway in, you strike the highest point of The Federation Walk. Here, at the top of a hillock, you can see both the Broadwater, thick with shifting sandbanks, and the ocean. It is beautifully quiet here, the heart of the forest, and you belong to no specific time, and all times. You can stand on the hillock and know the bleached sundials and currents of traffic are behind you, yet if you look north you can see the channels of the Broadwater and the beginnings of a string of mangrove islands that runs all the way up to Moreton Bay.
I have been in a boat among those islands and heard, at night, the sounds of crabs moving in the ancient mud, and could have been back at the dawn of time. I have never forgotten it. That primeval landscape, and in the distance, the halo glow of the lights of the Gold Coast. I have felt that too, in the rainforests of the hinterland. And now in the casuarina forest.
A kilometre past the hillock, at a dogleg turn of the path in the forest, you again begin to hear human voices, tangled in the feathers of the casaurinas, and you enter the final tunnel of trees that brings you out at the sea wall.
It is a beautiful run, the last few hundred metres, where you suddenly see at the end of the tunnel the waters of the Southport Bar and the tip of South Stradbroke Island.
You break out of the forest and it's as far as you can go. You stop, and you're back in the 21st century. There is the small lighthouse at the end of the sea wall to your right. And the car park and snack shop to your left. The Broadwater is busy with boats. Trawlers and smaller fishing boats and cruisers traverse the bar, where the ocean meets the Broadwater. To the north-west you can see fingers of high-rise at Runaway Bay and Paradise Point.
I wonder, standing here at the wall, why I have started running again since I've been back on the Gold Coast. Running, just as I did when I was a child. Why I have to disappear into the forest for an hour each day, no matter what the state of the weather, and that if I miss a run, I feel unsettled.
Perhaps the Gold Coast is a place where you run. Towards something or away from something. To me, it seems the perfect place to run.
After five minutes at the wall I turn back. I don't say I run home, because I'm no longer sure what that is. The casuarina forest, for the moment, is more home than anything.
And invariably, by the time I re-enter the trail at the same time each afternoon, the wind has picked up and the tops of the trees are quivering and sending out their music.
It is melancholy at times. Or happy. Or eerie. Sometimes it sounds like how you feel inside. Sometimes it's the sound of memories. And other times I have no idea what the tunes mean.
Whether they're coming from an unsettled present. Or whether they're songs from an unknown future. ♦