September 2011
The trees are signalling this morning: a million Morse code messages of light flashing on and off as the night’s raindrops are shaken by the breeze and snapped by the sun.
It is as though they are spruiking, luring customers into their own private world of magic and revelation, a world where nature can take on surprising forms that rival any of the man-made creations we sometimes pay an exorbitant amount to view and digest and maybe appreciate or maybe not.
For within the bush is hidden a gallery of most amazing shapes and forms, installations that may have taken years to create, that came into existence not to be admired and assessed, but simply to be and then in some cases to slowly disintegrate.
It is a changing exhibition, but one that viewers may have to wait years to observe the transformation.
Of course, there is always a rational explanation for the way plants grow or rocks are formed, but when we wander deep into the bush and come across natural sculptures that really make us stop and stare and wonder at their creation we are not looking for rationality.
Maybe it is the surprise of coming across something so unexpected that makes us pause and marvel, the discovery of a treasure hidden away for goodness knows how long, the delight in seeing with fresh eyes something that may have being lying dormant for ages until a curtain of foliage is suddenly pulled aside and there it is.
A few weeks ago a few of us in a Landcare group were probing the bush around our place for privet that was invading an area of beautiful, natural rainforest.
We pushed aside the vines hanging heavily from a gnarled, old sandpaper fig and found our privet.
Dead already from an earlier Landcare incursion, it was still standing tall and straight, stripped of foliage and small branches, but reincarnated as a living work of art.
Almost the entire length of its trunk was decorated with hundreds of cream, shell-like fungi. Rows upon rows of them, climbing up and up, a stairway to heaven.
I have been in that area several times before yet never seen it, but it must have been waiting like that for a long, long time.
How many other spectacles are hidden away in the bush, maybe only metres away from a well-worn path, that we haven’t seen because we haven’t really looked, or we haven’t looked with the right eyes?
Sometimes a solid form can take on a completely different character in a viewer’s eyes.
Behind our house, only fifty or so metres up in the bush but up a steep rise and hidden by thick undergrowth, is a wonderfully shaped rock I call Cleopatra’s Throne; it could have been sculpted for her.
Framed by hanging vines and rainforest trees it would be a perfect receptacle to catch a shower of water cascading over its shoulders, a place of coolness and comfort on a hot day.
We would love to have been able to move it the few metres down to our garden and set it up as a summer bath, but where it is in its natural setting it looks as though Cecil B. de Mille might have commissioned its sculpture for one of his epics – a setting of beauty and intrigue.
And finally, in any gallery of bush craft you would be sure to find an old seat hewn out of an even older log.
And here is a perfect example of such a seat, functional, attractive and full of character. It is right on the edge of a path where there is enough light to create colour, and the pinhead red caps of yet another fungus wave across its lace-like texture, a layered skirt hanging around its base.
Perhaps it would earn a place in the current Lace Exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum, where lace is defined as ‘a decorative, openwork fabric in which the pattern of spaces is as important as the solid areas’.
The pattern of spaces may be somewhat random for the purposes of the exhibition and maybe not yet extensive enough, but it is certainly a work in progress.
It is just waiting for someone to sink onto it and look around the surrounding bush, eyes open for more examples of bush art.
All these wonderful art works are in our own bush or that of our neighbours.
How many more there must be throughout the Valley, many already known to those who have looked, and others still waiting to be discovered?