Alone Looking at the Mountain

Alone Looking at a Mountain, I Wonder Why?

Recently I moved to southern NSW, to a district known as the Cooma Monaro Region. It is an elevated plateau, a landscape approximately 700m to 1200m above sea level. Cold in winter, dry and moderately hot in summer. Frosts are common. It is in the rainshadow of the mountains to the west, where cold winter weather systems are drained of their moisture and snow often falls. To the east, moisture, coming in off the coast, falls, as the air rises over the eastern escarpment, feeding the tall eucalypt forests of the southeast. Occassionally the moisture from these different directions makes it onto the plateau, sometimes as snow in winter and sometimes as decent rain. But generally it has been dry, the Monaro has been in drought, severe drought for quite a long time. Dry winds sweep across this landscape and have sapped the moisture, raised the dust out of the ground. Clear, blue, sky air sits above. Rounded, undulating hills. Gentle valleys, long frost hollows, rocky outcrops, short, steep-sided ravines, interpersed open woodland, tussock grasslands, dry intermittent creeklines, eroded.

The Monaro is an evocative landscape. It has a long pastoral history associated with European settlement. Gold, timber getting and sheep raising are its history and have largely shaped what we see today. But prior to European settlement this land had a long history of indigenous occupation.

It is no coincidence that I came here. It is all part of a plan.

I arrived here at the end of winter. I have come here for a number of reasons. It has warmed up which makes it better for the renovation work I am doing and I am closer to the mountains I love, the Australian Alps, where snow is still plentiful but in thaw and the weather is good. Spring is also a good time to commence a year long mission to understand this landscape, its history, its seasons, its plants and its people. But still there are other reasons, more important, more significant, more purposeful. There is more as to why I have come. Intuition, an urge, a desire, a dream. It is all part of the plan and dream, a plan and dream that will be lived out as the seasons pass. But for now, today, the view from the Monaro is looking pretty damn good. Li Po, chinese poet, traveller, sage of another age, I think would have liked it.

Alone Looking at the Mountain

All the birds have flown up and gone;
A lonely cloud floats leisurely by.
We never tire of looking at each other -
Only the mountain and I.

Li Po (701-762)