May 2011 - Once upon a time
There are some places that simply inspire stories. By their very nature they give rise to characters and legends that continue to be brought to life through the unique physicality of the place.
Once upon…. a time. Several years ago we were camping in the forests of the Transylvanian mountains, deep in the heart of present day Romania.
We had passed fairy tale castles perched high on impregnable cliffs and had settled for the night in a tiny glade surrounded by the darkness of primeval pines and beeches. At any moment we expected to see Hansel and Gretel come hand in hand through the trees, or more sinisterly, a werewolf materialize out of the mists of legend that seemed to be hauntingly present. Instead all we saw was an ancient cattle herder who wandered along the forest path with his few charges at dusk and dawn, the cows’ bells calling through the eerie gloom. He was as real as we were, but the place itself didn’t belong in present reality. There was no way it could be divorced from the time-honoured fantasies that it and similar places had inspired.
Once upon…. a dreamtime. Many, many years ago we were again camped, this time very close to Mootwingee in western NSW. It was in the days before the area had been returned to its traditional owners and become Mutawintji. As our campsite was so close to the ancient Aboriginal site we had been able to wander, virtually on our own, around the waterholes and the caves, many of them covered with ancient Aboriginal art, until the early winter dusk started to fall. It was then we could feel the ancestors of the place and their dreamtime stories begin to ooze out of the rocks and the water and immerse us in a feeling of powerful spirituality. They were as alive as we were, but they belonged as we never could.
Once upon…. our time. Much closer to home there are places that insist that stories be written. At the bottom of our road are three very old busses, hardly spiritual or ancient but certainly exuding an air of magic. They demand their stories be released. They sit at the end of a long, flat paddock, beside the rippling brook and backing directly on to the rainforested hillside, shaded by fern-encrusted branches of casuarinas. They are mostly only ever in dappled shade, so their rusted, peeling exteriors look even more faded than they really are. Their origins in this place are fairly prosaic. They were brought in to serve as a scout camp, but the scouts have long since disappeared and the busses have sunk into a verdant somnolence, with each one moulding into its own persona. The light inside each is different, probably caused by the different amount of moss and lichen growing on the windows. One has a green haze, another is slightly orange and the third is more aquamarine. The interiors have all collapsed, weighed down by the detritus of weathering time. When my grandchildren were young I wrote them stories about the busses. The children and the horses that were also in the stories were introduced to the busses by the local water dragon, who was the intermediary between them and the creatures of the forest. He showed them how the busses had the magic to transport them to different faraway lands and also to bring them home safely again. One by one each horse and child entered a different bus. The magic coloured hue inside then spirited them away to the land of their ancestors, the Shetland pony to the green of the Shetland Isles, the Arabian pony to the orange deserts of Arabia, the children to the mists of Ireland. They can never look at those busses again and think of them as ordinary. How could they be, abandoned in such a mystical setting?
A little further down the road is the gingerbread cottage, which nestles close to the river underneath the casuarina trees.
Now almost hidden from sight by overgrowing vegetation, it has been there for many years, and can be thought of as nothing but a magic gingerbread house. In fact, it is now called ‘The Gingerbread House.’ Many stories could come out of that house, a house where, ‘when you see soft, grey smoke spiralling from the chimney it means fairy book folk are visiting and the wind whistling through the casuarinas sounds just like a lullaby.’
Kangaroo Valley is full of such places. Some are well known, such as Flat Rock, others hidden away and known only to a few. But wherever they are their stories will surface and be told and perhaps remembered until they themselves become legends. And sometime in the future someone again will write ‘Once upon a time’.