The Instant and the Aeon

Notes from a walk to Peggy’s Point

There is a particular sound the gravel makes underfoot on the track into the she-oaks, a sound I have never been able to properly name. Not quite a crunch. Not quite a hiss. Something between the two, as though the crushed rock itself were clearing its throat before it spoke, and never quite got to the words. You hear it before you see anything, before the ocean, before the granite, before the first grey-green needle of casuarina brushes your shoulder, and it is, I have come to think, the sound of an argument between your foot and forty million years of accumulated quartz, an argument you always lose, softly, underfoot, without either party noticing.

I want to tell you about walking to Peggy’s Point. I want to tell you properly, which is to say I want to tell you badly, in the manner of someone circling something too large to look at directly, glancing at it from the corner of the eye, from the side, from underneath, because looked at head-on it produces a kind of vertigo I am not sure I can describe, and which I am fairly certain no one has yet described to my satisfaction, though poets and geologists have both tried, from their separate camps, speaking different tongues about the same rock. And there is a third thing I want to tell you about, harder still to speak of plainly, which is not rock at all, and which I have been feeling on this point for as long as I have had the vocabulary to notice that I was feeling anything.

But I will come to that. First, properly, the walk.

It begins, oddly, before the walk has begun. Unremarkable in every particular, a turning circle, a sign, the ordinary scuff of tyres and boot soles on bitumen, and I have never once, not as a child and not as whatever I am now, stepped off that asphalt onto the crushed gravel verge where the track proper starts without feeling something shift. It does not announce itself the way the view at the point announces itself, with that sudden violent chord of sky and sea and rock. It is quieter than that, and stranger for being quieter: a low hum, felt rather than heard, somewhere behind the sternum, in roughly the same place the falling sensation arrives later, at the point itself, except softer, further off, like a room you can hear people talking in through a wall, without being able to make out a single word.

I have tried, over the years, to explain this feeling away in every reasonable manner available to a rational adult. It is the change underfoot, I have told myself, the give of gravel after the hard flat certainty of asphalt, a sensory shift the nervous system registers as a kind of arrival. It is the sound, I have told myself, the road noise of the Tasman falling away, replaced by the sigh of she-oak and the first far thread of the sea, a change any body would register as a hush, a lowering of the shoulders. These explanations are perfectly sound. I believe them, more or less, on the days I am being sensible.

And none of them touch the actual texture of the thing, which is this: from the moment I leave the car park, I feel, quite distinctly, that I am not alone on that track, and that whoever or whatever it is that is not-alone with me is female. I do not say this as a claim about ghosts, or spirits, or any of the tidy vocabularies our culture keeps in reserve for feelings it would rather file away than sit with. I say it as a plain report of a sensation I have had, consistently, since childhood, on this one particular stretch of track and nowhere else I have ever walked, in any country, in any season, a hum, a presence, something that sits at the very edge of touch without ever quite arriving at it, the way you can sometimes feel a person has entered a room behind you before you have heard the door.

Beneath the she-oaks on gravel the colour of weak tea, and the canopy is low enough, close enough, that the sky disappears almost entirely, filtered down to coins and slivers of white-grey light, the effect is oddly cathedral: not the gilded sense of the word, but the older sense, the sense it must have had before anyone put stained glass in a window: a place made by growing things that channels the eye upward and the mind inward, that hushes you without meaning to. Allocasuarina, the botanists call these trees, though nobody who has stood beneath one needs the Latin to know they are in the presence of something old and faintly grieving. Their foliage is reduced to thin green wires, needles that are not needles but stems pretending to be needles. And when the wind moves through them, they make a sound unlike any other tree I know: not a rustle, not a roar, but something closer to breath, or to weeping, if weeping could be dry and endless and entirely without sentiment.

It is here, under the she-oaks, that the hum from the car park thickens into something nearer a voice without ever quite becoming one. I have stood still on that track more times than I can count, ostensibly catching a breath, actually just listening, trying to separate the trees' own sound from whatever else is moving through it: a hopeless exercise, because the two are braided together so completely that I am no longer sure, after forty plus years of walking this track, whether the presence I feel here is a thing the trees are somehow carrying, the way a wire carries a current it did not itself generate, or whether the trees and the feeling are the very same phenomenon wearing two disguises: one botanical, one something else. The colonists called these trees she-oaks because their wood was softer than the true oaks of the old world, unfit, in the colonists' estimation, for the harder work of building, a small, offhand insult, the same reflex that named so much of this country as an absence of the old country rather than a presence of itself. But in giving the tree that diminishing name, the colonists also, without meaning to, granted it a gender, and the sound it makes in wind is very often described, by people with no reason at all to be thinking about the thing I am describing to you, as a kind of sighing, a kind of voice.

I do not want to make more of that coincidence than it deserves. A naming convention from the seventeen-nineties is a thin thread to hang a lifetime's worth of feeling on. But I offer it anyway, because this whole article is an exercise in curiosity rather than conclusion, and the coincidence is, at the very least, curious.

And then, without warning, because the track through she-oak never announces its ending, it simply stops being a tunnel and starts being an edge, the canopy breaks, and you are standing at Peggy’s Point.

I want to try to describe what happens in that instant, because I think it is close to the whole of what this essay is actually about, more than the history, more than the geology, more than the presence I have been circling since the car park. You come out of the trees and the whole apparatus of your ordinary sense of time: what year it is, what decade, whether the tide is in or out, simply falls away for a second or two, replaced by something I can only call contact. You are, for that instant, in unmediated contact with something enormously old, and the strange thing is that the oldness does not arrive as a fact you know but as a feeling you have, immediately, in the body, before the mind has done any of its usual translating work. You do not think this rock is old. You feel, somewhere beneath the sternum, the same somewhere the hum lives, a kind of falling, as though a lift cable somewhere had been quietly cut.

Not grey granite. Not the pale, patient granite of a European quarry. This is a granite the colour of last light on skin, pink shading to a deep ochre-orange where the lichen has taken hold, a colour that looks, in certain slants of afternoon sun, less like rock than like something that has recently stopped burning. The whole point is made of it: vast rounded slabs and boulders, some the size of a fist, some the size of a house, tumbled and stacked in configurations that look, to the eye fresh from the she-oak dark, deliberate. Placed. As if some patient hand had set them there for a purpose it had since forgotten to explain.

I have stood on that granite prow and watched other walkers arrive behind me, and I have watched their faces do the same thing mine must do: a small widening, a brief cessation of talk, a silence that lasts perhaps three seconds before someone reaches for a phone.

Below the point, where the granite gives way to the water, there are rock pools deep enough to lose a body in, their floors gone dark and soft-looking with kelp, that thick leathery brown that grows in ropes along this whole coast, moving even in still water with a slow, deliberate sway that has nothing to do with any current a person standing above could actually feel. As a child and at low tide and on a calm day, I would lie flat on the warm granite at a pool's edge, chin on my folded arms, and stare down into that kelp-darkened water for what felt like whole afternoons, waiting, not idly, but with a specific, quiet, entirely serious expectation, for a shape to resolve itself out of the moving weed. A woman's shape. Not a mermaid, exactly; I knew, in my child's taxonomic way, the difference between the tailed creatures of picture books and whatever it was I was actually watching for, which had legs, or the suggestion of legs, and hair that moved the way the kelp moved, and a face I never once managed to imagine clearly enough to describe, even to myself.

She never surfaced. I do not think I truly expected her to, in the practical sense a child expects a parent to come when called. But the expectation itself was real, and it was not, I want to insist, a game so much as a fact I was checking, the way you might glance twice at a door you are almost certain, but not quite certain, someone has just walked through. I would come away with the particular disappointment of a hypothesis unconfirmed rather than a story unfulfilled, and the following summer I would lie down at the same pool and check the same door again.

I have asked myself, as an adult, where a child gets an image like that, on a coast where nobody in my own family had ever told me such a story. I do not have an answer I trust. It is possible the image is simply the ordinary furniture of a child's imagination, kelp and shadow and the mind's endless appetite for finding figures in ambiguous shapes, no different in kind from seeing a face in the moon. It is possible I heard some fragment of some story, maybe the legacy, story and narrative of Wauba Deba, and built the rest myself, the way memory does. And it is possible, I say this carefully, because it is the possibility I am least entitled to claim, that the feeling was never really mine to manufacture at all, but was instead something the place itself was doing to me, the way the she-oaks' sigh does something to everyone who walks beneath them, whether or not they have the sensitivity to notice.

I am not going to resolve that for you, because I have never managed to resolve it for myself. I offer you instead the plain, repeated fact of the noticing: a hum from the car park, thickening under the she-oaks, arriving fully, though never quite crossing over into a sighting, or a voice, or a touch, at the water's edge below the point, where a child once lay on warm granite and watched kelp move like hair, waiting for a woman who was, in every ordinary sense, not there.

Let me set that feeling, now, against the other kind of time this place keeps, because I think the two are, in a way I can gesture toward more easily than I can prove, related.

Somewhere in the vicinity of three hundred and eighty million years ago, in the Devonian period, when the only creatures that had yet ventured onto dry land were insects and the first tentative amphibians, a great body of molten rock forced its way up from far below the crust and stalled, deep underground, and began, very slowly, to cool. This is the part of the story that is hardest to hold in the mind, because it happened in the dark, under immense pressure, over a span of time so long that the individual crystals of feldspar and quartz had leisure enough to grow to a coarse, visible size, you can see them still, pink blocky crystals the width of a fingernail, each one a small monument to the patience of the process that made it. Granite that cools quickly is fine-grained, almost featureless. Granite that cools slowly, entombed, produces crystals you can read with your thumb. The rock at Peggy’s Point took its time.

And then, this is the part that still undoes me, nothing happened, for an unfathomable stretch of years. The granite sat there, buried, while above it entire seas opened and closed, while the landmass that would one day be Australia and Antarctica and India travelled together as Gondwana and then, with a slowness that makes the word began almost comic, pulled apart. Dinosaurs rose and had their long day and were ended by a rock falling from the sky on the far side of the planet. And the whole time, that body of pink granite waited out an interval next to which every other span in this article, the forty to sixty thousand years of human presence on this coast, the two hundred since the sealers, the four seconds of the instant, a child's whole afternoon at a rock pool, is not merely small but of another order entirely, incommensurable, like comparing the weight of a word to the weight of a stone.

It was ordinary erosion, over tens of millions of years, that eventually stripped away the overlying rock and let the granite see daylight for what geologists believe may be the first time in its existence. And that rust-orange bloom across its upper surfaces, the colour that makes the point look, from a distance, faintly aflame, is not the rock's own colour at all, but a separate living thing, lichen so patient in its growth that scientists use it to date rockfalls and glacial retreats, a single coin-sized patch representing a century or more of near-imperceptible spreading. What you are looking at, in that instant on the point, is several kinds of time arranged at once: the granite's aeons, the lichen's centuries, the ocean's endless renewing present, the hum's own uncounted duration, which I cannot date because I do not know what it is, only that it was there before I had a name for anything, and is there still.

I said the point felt, in that first instant, like an ancient monolith, and the word is doing more work than it appears to. A monolith is not simply an old rock; it is a rock that has been recognised, that has become, in the act of being noticed, a marker, a standing-place. The granite at Peggy’s Point asked to be nothing at all for the better part of four hundred million years. It became a monolith only when someone first stood in front of it and felt what I feel: that here was a fixed point, a thing large enough and strange enough to matter to a creature passing through.

And the question that will not leave me alone is simply this: who was the first? Who was the first to come out of some earlier version of that she-oak stand and feel that same fall in the chest, standing on that same warm rock with the same three-part vista opening in front of them: and did they, too, feel something walk in beside them from the edge of whatever served, for them, as the made world? I ask that half in earnest and half knowing I will never have an answer, but a question asked in earnest does not require an answer to be worth the asking.

We will never know the name, the season, whether it was a child who saw it first or an old woman walking slow at the back. But we know, with a confidence the earliest European visitors could not have imagined, that the moment happened long before any ship arrived to record its own, much later, arrival. The archaeological record of lutruwita, now reaches back more than forty thousand years, evidence recovered from limestone caves in the island's remote southwest. Forty thousand years means human beings: families, children, the full ordinary apparatus of love and grief and shelter, have been present here for roughly sixteen hundred generations. Whoever first stood on this point, they were not a beginning. They were already inheriting a very long story. And they were not walking, that first time, toward an ocean.

This is the part that undoes me more than the geology, because it requires imagining a version of this exact place no living eye has seen: Peggy’s Point, dry-footed, looking out not over the Tasman Sea but a vast rolling plain.

For most of the last hundred thousand years the planet was locked in an ice age, and at its coldest point, some twenty thousand years ago, so much water was frozen into glaciers that global sea levels stood some hundred and twenty-five metres lower than today, enough that the seabed of what we now call Bass Strait was simply land: a wind-scoured plain geologists call the Bassian Plain, grazed by kangaroos and giant now-extinct marsupials, crossable on foot from what is now Melbourne to what is now Bicheno without wetting a boot. Which means this granite point, this place where a hum meets me at the asphalt's edge and does not leave until I am back in the car, stood for most of its human history not above an ocean at all, but above a hill with a view over grassland reaching to a coastline far beyond the visible horizon. The sea I stand in front of, so permanently itself, is on the granite's clock a startlingly recent guest, one who arrived, made herself entirely at home, and has been here so briefly the rock has barely noticed. But the sea's return began roughly eighteen thousand years ago, as the ice loosened its grip, at first almost imperceptibly and then, as ice sheets collapsed in the north, in accelerating pulses, shallow bays, then marshy islands, then, somewhere between fourteen and eight thousand years ago, the last dry connection drowned entirely, and this island became an island in the sense we now understand: its people cut off, permanently, by a strait too rough to cross by any craft then available.

I find it difficult, standing on the point, not to think of what that meant: not as an abstraction but as a lived, multigenerational catastrophe, slow enough that no one experienced it as a single event, fast enough that grandparents could tell grandchildren, accurately, that the sea now stood where good hunting ground once had. And what strikes me most is that the memory appears not to have been lost. Oral traditions recorded from Aboriginal communities, stories of great floods, of country once joined to country now separated by water, have been validated by researchers against the geological record of exactly when the land bridge disappeared, and the correspondence, across many independent language groups, is too consistent to be coincidence. The narrative, however transformed by ten thousand years of retelling, is an actual memory of the sea's arrival, longer than the pyramids have stood, longer than writing has existed anywhere, kept alive where the granite framing the telling had already been waiting, by then, for something in the vicinity of four hundred million years.

The ocean stops looking permanent, thinking of that. It starts looking like the newest thing in the entire view, and the granite becomes instead a witness: the one constant that watched a plain become a strait. And I wonder whether whatever meets me at the car park and waits, unseen, in the kelp below the point, is not a presence in that history so much as a presence of it, some residue left behind by the sheer scale of loss and adaptation this coast has witnessed, the way a struck bell keeps a faint hum going long after the strike itself is over, audible only if you put your ear close enough, and stay quiet long enough, to hear it. I do not say this as a claim. I say it as the closest my own imagination has come to giving the feeling a shape it might be willing to hold.

The people of this coast, the Paredarerme, of the Oyster Bay nation, did not vanish with the drowning of the plain. They adapted, turning increasingly toward the sea that had taken so much of their country, becoming, over the millennia, among the most accomplished coastal people this continent has known: divers for abalone in water cold enough to leave an untrained body gasping and quickly numbed and keepers of a working knowledge of tide and weather that the sealers and whalers who followed rarely thought worth learning. Both the historical record and the community's own oral memory agree that it was very often the women who did the most dangerous of that diving, swimming down through kelp not unlike the kelp I lay above as a child, holding a breath that would have humbled the best of divers. I did not know that fact then. I have known it only a handful of years, and I cannot pretend it did not quietly rearrange the way I understand my own much older watching.

So who else?

Who else has walked this track, on this same point, over the whole run of documented and undocumented time?

There were, almost certainly, the paredarerme families whose country this was, walking it the ordinary unremarked way people walk the country they belong to, checking the shellfish beds at low tide, moving between camps along a pattern so long-practised it would barely have registered as walking to anywhere at all. There were, from the eighteen-hundreds, the sealers, whose logs occasionally mention hauling up in the lee of this cape to wait out a squall. There were the whalers who followed, and the surveyors drawing lines, and later the locals, walkers proper, the naturalists, the honeymooners, the retirees with binoculars watching for whales still passing, in season, along the same migratory path they have followed for longer than there has been anyone at all standing on this granite to see it.

So, there was, once, a child (me) on his stomach at the edge of a rock pool, watching kelp for a face that never came. And, in a short while, you, if this piece has done a fraction of what I hope, and you find yourself following a gravel track under a canopy of she-oak. I will not tell you to expect the hum. I do not know if it is mine alone, some private wiring laid down in a particular child on a particular afternoon and never since disconnected, or whether it is simply this place's ordinary weather, available to anyone quiet enough to register it. I only know I have never once made this walk without it, in forty years, and that whatever else this article has tried to explain, it has failed, entirely and by design, to explain that.

————

I want to end where I began, with the sound, because I think it is closer to an answer than anything else here, even if it is not, and will never be, one I can hand you whole.

The gravel underfoot is not the same granite as the point itself, but it comes from the same enormous slow-cooked body of rock, weathered smaller, still carrying in each grain the same coarse structure that took shape three hundred and eighty million years ago in the entombed dark. Every step on that track is a small act of contact with deep time: your weight transferred, for a fraction of a second, through sole and sock and skin and bone, into fragments of the same monolith you are walking toward, before it has even come into view. And every step, for reasons I cannot fully account for, is also a small act of contact with something else again, a hum that starts at the asphalt's edge and does not properly leave until I am back in the car, engine running, the ordinary world reasserting its claims.

Then the she-oaks fall away, and for an instant, three seconds, perhaps four, before the phone comes out, you are standing in a shaft that runs straight down through every timescale this place contains at once: the granite's aeons, the lichen's centuries, the sea's brief eighteen-thousand-year residency, the sixteen hundred generations of human presence, the two hundred plus years of written record, a child at a rock pool, and beneath all of it, unresolved, unnamed, patient in a way that makes even the granite's patience look hurried: the hum.

I do not know how long people have been walking over Peggy’s Point. Archaeology of this island makes it all but certain that they were there, at some point in a span of tens of thousands of years, doing more or less what I did: coming out of the trees, feeling the ground open into sky and sea and stone, and stopping, before walking on. I do not know, either, what it is that meets me at the edge of the car park and stays with me the whole way in, and I have made a kind of peace with the likelihood that I never will: that the not-knowing is not a gap waiting to be closed by better research, but the actual, permanent shape of the thing itself. It is the story. It is the shape of the curiosity this place produces in anyone who stands on it long enough to let the instant do its work, where sky, sea, and four-hundred-million-year-old granite meet in equal measure, where a hum without a name has kept a small child, and then an adult, company since long before there were words to ask what it wanted, and where your own brief life is let in, however briefly, on a much longer conversation that will continue, entirely unhurried, long after you have gone back through the she-oak, to the car, to whatever ordinary Saturday is waiting on the other side of the trees, and long after the hum, whatever it is, has let you go, for now, until you come back to check the same door.

AM -