Travelling south

Tags

Bournda NP, Handkerchief Beach, Janet DeBoos, Narek Gallery

In my bizarre search for the free photo print, I drove south to Merimbula. As always, I made a picnic of it and enjoyed introducing a friend to some of my bush and cultural pleasures along the coast road between Bermagui and Tathra.

We began with coffee at Bermagui, sitting on the deck in the morning sun at the fish and chip shop my friend knew as a child. We looked down into clear water squirming with fish, and out to the presence of Gulaga, looming in clear sky without its cloud cloak.

 

 

Grand plans for a grand tour into all the segments of Mimosa Rock NP and Bournda NP shrank under the pressure of time. We only managed a walk through ti tree and kunzea from North Tura to Bournda Island, along the edge of the lazy-waved turquoise ocean. The bush creaked and groaned and squeaked above us, reminding me of the imaginary hahas my children invented to terrify their friends – the creatures who made those eerie tree-noises.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After a picnic in Bournda on the other side of Bournda Lagoon, we visited the exhibition of Janet de Boos porcelain at Narek Galleries in Tanja, an oddly pleasing mix of simple and highly decorative styles on the same vessel: rough-textured earth colours and high gloss vividness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The camellia at the door ushered us back to the natural world and the drive home up the coast.

 

There was time for a quick detour into Handkerchief Beach, just south of Narooma. I've only just started visiting it. Thirty years ago a friend was threatened there by a madman with a bit of 4 x 4, shouting “Get off my beach!” My imagination has always peopled it with that man and that threat, and my timidity has avoided it. Recently (yes! It took me thirty years!) I realised how silly that was, and found a place of tranquillity where Nangudga Lake merges with the sea and where we ended our day of sun, friendship, bush, aesthetics and south coast tourism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Rock lilies or Sydney rock orchids: Dendrobium speciosum (or is it Thelychiton speciosus?)

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Arthur Boyd, August to October, Bald Rock NP, Bournda NP, Brogo Dam, Bundanon, Dendrobium speciosum, Ellis Rowan, George Raper, Joseph Lycett, lithophytes, Margaret Preston, Thelychiton speciosus

Wherever there are rocks, rock lilies seem to appear. My first sighting was from a canoe on Brogo Dam about fifteen years ago, before my love affair with orchids began. There they were, creamy white against a sheer cliff face which dripped with moss and moisture. I had no idea what they were but I knew they were beautiful.

I encountered them again years later on a high ridge in the bush west of Bodalla. Leathery leaves on sheer rock face, much drier this time, and yes! there were flowers.  Of course, as survivors they had put themselves out of reach on a steep cliff. But they made themselves known, and us hungry for more.

So we returned a week later, now a bit familiar with their habit and habitat, and took a bet on another ridge in the neighbourhood. We walked up a gentle slope through the reddish-orange trunks of angophera, and there they were – pseudobulbs, those thick stems typical of rock orchids, and racemes loaded with buds and occasional flower, all within easy reach of eyes and camera.

This was the beginning of a trek through treasures. The whole of that ridge was alive with rock orchids. Sometimes we needed to scramble and contort for the perfect view.

I managed climbs and balances I would not have believed myself capable of. I wanted to see and smell and take photos and  peer down throats and delight in the maroon freckling and breathe in the spicy perfume.

After that visit, I considered myself an apprentice connoisseur of the rock lily. I recognised them immediately in paintings  by Joseph Lycett and felt inordinately proud, given my usual poor recognition skills.

I found rock lilies many times over the years: on the rockface as I walked down the rock staircase into the rainforest patch around the lagoon at Bournda National Park in southern NSW;

on the tors called the Two Sisters as I drove along the highway between Bodalla and Narooma;

and as I walked through the bush to the top of Bald Rock in granite country in northern NSW.

When I visited Arthur Boyd’s studio at Bundanon with an old friend and fellow orchid afficianado we saw his painting The amphitheatre still hanging on the wall. A white snake slithers down the rock face,  cropped trees lean every which way and rock lilies bloom. (The painting is reproduced here with the permission of Bundanon Trust.)

After a picnic under old European trees near the house, we strolled up the track towards the amphitheatre, detouring to visit a hut set in the middle of a slashed paddock. A snake slid out of the grass, an omen of orchids we hoped.

The amphitheatre was a grand place. The rock walls towered above us and the trees leaned in just as they did in Boyd’s painting.

There were great clusters of rock lilies everywhere.

Boyd and Lycett weren’t the only artists drawn to the rock lily. George Raper, a midshipman on the Sirius in the First Fleet, painted a watercolour of the rock lily, probably in 1789.

Ellis Rowan, that most wonderful of flower painters, also captured rock lilies in watercolour

and Margaret Preston celebrated them in a series of woodcuts.

Having seen such a luxuriance of rock lilies in the wild and out of the tip of the artist’s paintbrush and knife, it was an anti- climax to discover them cultivated in a manicured front yard in Oak Flats, and in amputated sprays on the table at a family celebration.

Addendum: As I was preparing this blog I discovered that the rock lily has undergone a name change. In David Jones’ Field guide (2000) it is Dendrobium speciosum. By his 2006 Complete Guide it has undergone a taxonomic segregation from Dendrobium and become Thelychiton speciosus. It is also known as both Sydney rock orchid and rock lily.

Acknowledgements:

The National Library of Australia gave me permission to include

Ellis Rowan: Rock lily (Dendrobium speciosum) nla.pican 6723370

George Raper: Dendrobium (Rock lily) vn3579494

Thanks to my fellow orchid tragic for finding the Lycett images for me and for drawing my attention to George Raper.