Bush tracks tangle together in the suburban hills that frame my neighbourhood, which sits on Turrbal and Jagera country. They’re old fire trails, scraped together in haphazard organisation and used occasionally for backburning in the cooler months. In more recent years the council or neighbours have wandered up here to dig out clogged drains after rains that fell in sheets from above.
Dogs are allowed here (on leash); people are too (off leash).
It is a Thursday morning in March. We’re having an endless summer in this part of the world and, even though it’s officially autumn, our bodies expunge moisture as though we’re all on a spit, on high rotation. Few venture up this mountain, at this time of the mid-week day. Down below, people walk their dogs along cracked suburban footpaths as early morning tradies drive past to start their day.
In this place above suburbia, smell precedes sight. It’s thick and strong and musty. It’s a thousand leaves, still damp from the early morning dew, that sit and congregate and breakdown the world together. It’s a smell that sparks memories long forgotten in the surrounding suburbs where leaf-blowers and gasoline have almost eradicated any scents of the natural world.
It’s a steep learning curve, this mountain. It’s grey with loose rocks and Ironbark trees and grasses and gums that keep the slope in check. The ground is uneven and sections have broken apart by water or wind. It seems quiet even when it is not. In truth, there are layers upon layers of sound in this place: birds and lizards and snakes move and laugh and squawk around me constantly. I notice them, because I am walking alone.
I pulled on my boots this morning after finishing Kerri Andrews’ chapter on Ellen Weeton in her book Wandering. I’m thinking of Weeton’s walking story while walking today. Weeton was a governess from Lancashire, in the UK, whose writing was not published until after her death in 1850.
“Walking,” writes Andrews, “and the fortification of the body and mind that it had enabled, freed (Weeton) from the limiting influence of the ‘social mores subscribed to by both men and women, the threat implicit in sexual harassment.’”[1]
Weeton, says Andrews, found solace, and strength, in walking alone. The more she walked, the stronger she became in mind and body. The stronger she became, the less fearful she was of the dangers of walking alone, dangers of the human kind. Later in her life Weeton married, and then divorced, a very violent man. Andrews says it was walking, at this time, which allowed her to rely on the “strength of body and will”.
I’m thinking about these words as I walk today, and how they help me to articulate the essentialness of walking, of movement in and through the world in general. This essentialness in movement has emerged in relation to my work, research that exists, mostly, in a space of stillness.
I work with the words women have written and spoken, about their experiences of sexual assault, violence, and consent. These words are worrying, distressing, and disturbing and I spend my days wondering what these words mean, and why they are so similar to all the other words of harm that have emerged from women in previous generations. Why nothing seems to change too much.
Since I started this work, though, I have felt the need, an insistence, to wander. After many hours at my computer screen, it is essential that I head for the hills, the road, or the water. I am trying to put my finger on it, what all this walking and running and swimming is about. I think it has something to do with freedom. There is freedom in walking alone. And perhaps that is all we are seeking in all of this: freedom. But I am still working it out. And so I keep writing.
What I am listening to: I am a big fan of the Journaling with Nature podcast by Australian artist and environmental educator Bethan Burton and have long followed the extraordinary work of nature journaler Dion Dior so I was thrilled to discover a conversation between the pair in one of Bethan’s recent podcast. They have a fantastic discussion about the place of art and storytelling in scientific research, and how nature journaling is carving an essential place in citizen science. It was enough to get me starting a new nature journal as soon as I got home from my walk!
[1] Kerri Andrews, Wanderers: A History of Women Walking, 2020. P.102
Inspired by your writing, I have started walking again. This time around I am walking in a body I don't recognise. My thighs rub as I walk and my knees and feet ache afterward. But I keep walking as a way to get to know this new body I find myself in. Walking gives me time and freedom to think about what this weight I now carry is here to do. It gives me time to think about what this new body might be trying to protect me from. So I will keep walking towards that feeling of freedom you write about. Perhaps for me, it will be the freedom of knowing my body - knowing her and loving her for what she is trying to do for me.