What makes your Nillumbik home town/area unique? Who are the characters who have made it so? What sites have significance and why?
During 2005 Nillumbik Shire Council and the Literary Reference Group invited members of the community to respond to these questions, to show us the history and flavour of your place – then and now – in a 500 word anecdote. This article was originally titled: Fool’s Gold
An artist daubs his palette with colours gorgeous: a hint of sienna, a flash of flame,
purest saffron veined with gold, and a bold vermillion splash.
A poet’s pen becomes a wand of magic as it scrolls across parchment, speaking to us in beautiful words, cloaking us in wonderment.
The eloquent hands of a musician bring vibrance to a composition paying homage to this season of change, rustling with surprise.
Leaves tumble and swirl, cascading over a child who counts the colours……
This is the way we think. The way we have been conditioned to think.
Autumn’s fruits nourish the exotic birds, interlopers across this continent. Those leaves admired by man often end in fiery furnaces polluting the land that adopted them. Our waterways become tainted with a sodden mass of tobacco-brown, our gutters clog with autumn’s offerings. The large plane leaf – a plumber’s delight. Scarlet berries tempt our animals with their toxic juices.
So if you reconsider, you will realize that Autumn is a time of feral rejoicing.
But in this Shire, the hills are hazed with silver above the soft Nillumbik green; a zephyr wafts aromatic scents. Here, joyfully, the native fauna feast on what
belongs to their land. The honeyed heart of a Grevillea flower offers tempting morsels, and beneath the eucalyptus bark a banquet awaits. A fairy ring of native fungi forms before my eyes. I make a wish! Tiny flowers smile as they play hide and seek amidst the kangaroo grass. A bellbird chimes away the day as currawongs flirt and play. The Banjo frog chases a water beetle across the reedfringed pond.
But here and there, the stark arms of an exotic tree perform obeisance to an animist spirit awaiting the snow that does not come. Nearby a Kookaburra sits and laughs.
Autumn of the old world can downgrade our senses, pushing them into hibernation because our patterns are still dictated to by the traditions of a distant hemisphere. We await a false spring, because we had a false autumn, but the bush happily waves a baton of golden wattle at us. Its heredity does not acknowledge the existence of such a strange season of death and decay. Here it is a time of budding and rebirth.
‘Autumn’ is the alien which arrived on a ship blown off-course and deposited on a unique shore which had known no such season.
Gwayne Naug ©
