Pilgrimage to Frog Hollow - by Clare Murphy
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The man my mother and aunt call Honey Bear leaves my window wound up. Through it, I watch as my parents follow Honey Bear’s ambling gait across the dual carriageway – from the bush-lined side he has parked me, over to the side with the modest blonde-brick house we will buy. The trees outside the car vibrate in greens, olives, greys, browns, whites – in shades I can’t remember ever seeing before – alive with the electric energy of cicada chant. In the trapped heat of the car’s maroon interior, my polyester polka-dot dress has begun to prickle under the armpits. Squinting at the house for a sign of my parents’ return, I wonder woozily why this man has left me here without even a hint of honey.
This is my first memory of Australia: at the edge of peri-urban Algester, age three. I am parked on the southernmost margin of Brisbane where it joins the shire of Logan, where tiled roofs and pony clubs are beginning to push a pocket of brown into the surrounding green. We had lived in the early scratches of this suburb before, around the time of my birth, in what had been my mother’s second attempt to adopt this country. But that had been before she became sick, packed us up for her homeland and made my first memories English.
Forty-three years later, standing with my family in the Karawatha Forest carpark not far from Algester, this sense of displaced confusion revisits me. It is the end of the first Brisbane lockdown. I have just come home from the hospital with a sick teenage daughter – to find the whole world shuttered. I have watched the disintegration of knowns through screens of varying sizes, peering through pixelated portholes – when not fussing over my daughter, worrying about her twin or fretting for her older sister, who has found herself stuck behind closed borders unable to leave the country for her university exchange.
Now in the forest carpark, we watch fine-limbed children with heads made massive by globular helmets whiz along the concrete strip that helixes through the clipped grass of the picnic area; we dodge young adults in athleisurewear and pastel trainers crunching up and down the tracks, pushing small white dogs like obligatory mops along the forest floor. We are here in search of the same thing: some kind of restoration. A salve. Something increasingly referred to as green therapy. We are here because we do not know where else to go.
“We are here in search of the same thing: some kind of restoration. A salve. Something increasingly referred to as green therapy. We are here because we do not know where else to go.”
My daughter’s illness means she is not allowed to walk far but I have forgotten to bring a map and nothing conjured by phone is comprehensible. As if following the Zealous Settler’s Handbook of Coloniser Tropes, we lose our way somewhere between the Echidna Track and the Entolasia Trail and descend into sour looks and barely bitten tongues. The fresh air we’ve come for simmers in our lungs.
‘Why didn’t you bring your water?’ I say, in response to murmured grumbling.
‘Why didn’t you bring a map?’ comes the swift reply.
We walk on, in pairs or alone, kicking up the ochre dust of sandstone ridges before the distant canopies of dark ironbarks give way to stands of pale scribbly gums where hairy orange caterpillars hang from webs in conformist mobs. When paperbarks begin to appear, baring their soft cream bellies above the swaying sedges, we realise we have somehow managed to fluke the way to Frog Hollow.
I post a picture to Instagram of my daughters on a timber bridge. In it, the sick child’s feet dangle in a clump of strappy dianella as she examines her brittle fingernails; the other two stare with glazed eyes, arms folded, toward a waterhole that has shrivelled to a crusty wet scab. Beneath this picture, I type a quote from Susan Sontag’s Pilgrimage (1987):
‘And I uttered nothing but tongue-tied simplicities, though I was full of complex feeling. We were neither of us at our best.’
‘#teenengagement’, a friend comments.
The crying face emoji doesn’t seem up to the task of reply.
‘#yuggeracountry,’ I offer weakly.
+++
When someone you are close to gets sick and you don’t know when or if or how they will heal, everything changes. When a world gets sick you can multiply that by 7.9 billion.
Throughout my childhood, my mother was often sick. It was not the kind of sickness you gave a name, but the kind you learnt to watch for. The kind that announced you would soon be packing up for somewhere else. Staying a while. Passing through, before returning to Algester, or close by.
The Yuggera people who have always belonged to the country in and around Karawatha are no strangers to the concept of passing through. Melissa Lucashenko in consultation with Yuggera elders writes that:
In Aboriginal culture, people other than traditional owners visit or pass through others’ territory only with permission. Before white contact, many Aboriginal peoples travelling the ancient tracks which later became Logan Road would have passed close to the forest area, and probably camped within it as guests of the Yuggera …
The ‘carefully managed’ Half Moon Lagoon system would have provided the Yuggera and their guests with ‘wallaby, goanna, snake, fish, lobsters and possum … honey, yams, berries ...’ (Lucashenko 2016, Karawatha Forest Protection Society).
What I can’t help notice is how different this is from the ‘passing through’ that I knew. It is a way of connecting people and places together. It is a sharing of the stories of place.
When I think about my idea of Algester, the place where things had felt most right for me even when they weren’t, it becomes apparent to me that I too was only ever passing through – without permission. That the familiarity I craved depended on the Yuggera peoples’ despair, at what may have seemed a rapidly spreading sickness.
+++
On the morning that I decide that we – the family – must visit Karawatha, I drag the map’s blue line straight through Algester towards it. Twenty minutes later, I find myself trying to navigate a route through the uncanny valley of my own mind. The sclerophyll forest that once surrounded Algester, defining it, is mostly gone. In its place is the well-manicured suburb of Stretton, which the protected forest touches. All around me, new lives have been erected from concrete slabs and cream guttering with fences to match. Everything is nice. New. The dreams are as wide as the drives needed to accommodate the SUVs. New dreams, paving over the barely old and those that endure here.
“Everything is nice. New. The dreams are as wide as the drives needed to accommodate the SUVs. New dreams, paving over the barely old and those that endure here.”
In my mind, this suburb is a new addition. In reality, it has existed for 25 years, blooming on the map like bacteria in a Petri dish ever since I left.
+++
We know that the suburbs are, by and large, places of impermanence, that they lend themselves to transience, to communities defined by ephemeral connection. Many of us who live in them see ourselves not as custodians but as distracted janitors waiting for our shift to end. We raise our children here in the hope that they will leave. To stay in a suburb forever might mean that you are not thriving, that you are stuck in the past. This thinking swerves me into frustration and fear: a pandemic is now stopping my children from leaving. I am not equipped to teach them how to be in the one place, despite it being the place where half their stories have been set. But I am coming to understand that I must try. Adolescence is too often seen as a place like the suburbs: somewhere to pass through swiftly with its difficulties erased from our memories soon after. In shunning these memories, we lose the opportunity to share all that we have learnt in that place. We prune away the connections we believe will not help us bloom, and spend our lives looking elsewhere for what we think we have lost.
“Adolescence is too often seen as a place like the suburbs: somewhere to pass through swiftly with its difficulties erased from our memories soon after. In shunning these memories, we lose the opportunity to share all that we have learnt in that place. We prune away the connections we believe will not help us bloom, and spend our lives looking elsewhere for what we think we have lost.”
If I were to give my mother’s sickness a name, I might call it memory loss – acquired in England’s rural midlands, where she first felt she could not thrive. It is a kind of cultural sickness, one that prunes away the understanding that we are in relationship with our environment and those we share it with, wherever that environment may be and whatever state it might be in. Its source is in the received thinking that divides city from country, human from more-than-human, nature from culture – the coding that assigns dominance, ownership, use and value to place and chooses who and what that excludes. It is heritable and highly transmissible. It manifests as a perceived loss of connection to place, and keeps us settlers searching for one. It is what we seek green therapy to restore. But in seeking this restoration, we may transmit our sickness further, ignoring the actual loss that First Nations peoples have endured.
The truth is, we don't need to go looking for what we think we have lost to begin to heal. We need to remember and listen. We need to learn how to care for the place we are in as if it is someone we are close to, as if it is part of ourselves.
Collectively, we are beginning to understand that sickness cannot be isolated, forgotten, paved over. That we cannot keep passing through, erasing our histories: that we need to acknowledge the scars and the sicknesses we have shared.
+++
I don’t remember Honey Bear and my parents returning to the car. Only the jar-bound coils of a snake after my father fished it out of our pool. Shaking my shoes to dislodge resident redbacks. The car parts my father and uncle scavenged from wrecks in the bush across the road.
I don’t remember it as a perfect time – the threat of my mother’s sickness was ever-present – but like honey, these are the memories that sustain me, give a buzzing energy to the idea of what made me: sweet enough to coexist with all the others in and of that place. They make me hopeful that in our confused disorientation, like a family stumbling tongue-tied and full of complex feeling upon a waterhole, we can find a way to heal. ▼
Image: Karawatha Forest Park, by Karin
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