Читать книгу Of Rivers, Baguettes and Billabongs - Reg Egan - Страница 7

CHAPTER ONE

There is a stream, or creek, as we Australians say, deep in rugged hills and mountains not far from Victoria’s Alpine National Park and it is called very simply the Evans Creek. It flows into the King River which joins the Ovens River near Wangaratta and the Ovens flows into the Murray.

My brother and I, aged twelve and ten or thereabouts, walked to that stream many years ago, and I thought then how beautiful it was with its rocks, its overhanging trees and shrubs and its cold and its clarity. It is in a deep and steep gully, covered sparsely but adequately with medium-sized eucalypts, sweet bursaria, wattles and patches of bracken fern, and nearer the stream, a leggy shrub we used to call hazel, and the whole is interspersed with these wonderful rocks. It’s as if the rocks have been artistically placed with regard to the density and size of the trees and shrubs, and down by the watercourse, they are flat and smooth, so as to form small ledges and rough terraces. And I know that the scene has not changed even today, for it is still largely inaccessible

How exciting it was for us to set out that day on our journey of exploration! We had been given permission by our father to stay out in the bush overnight and he offered us only one piece of advice about finding our way there and back: “If you think you are lost go to the nearest gully or creek and follow it down. If you do that eventually you will come out at a farm somewhere around Cheshunt or Whitfield.”

So we ventured forth with nothing but warm jackets, a billy, a small frying pan, fishing line and hooks and a box of matches each. Oh, and some wonderful ham sandwiches liberally spread with Keen’s mustard — enough sandwiches for two meals.

In fact we had fish for dinner that night. And perhaps I do not need to tell you about trout straight from the water, fried and eaten in your fingers as dusk descends over the bush and the stars and a nail-moon emerge overhead. We kept our fire going all night and stayed as close to it as we dared, but we were glad to be up at daylight and fishing for our breakfast.

When we walked out that afternoon we both promised to return. I have reneged on that promise.

My love of streams progressed from that distant camping night on the Evans Creek and after a few years encompassed the trout river known as the Howqua near Mansfield, the King River below Powers Lookout and upstream into the foothills, the Ovens and its billabongs and even the Murrumbidgee and the Murray, and then, with a move to Melbourne, the seductive Yarra.

The Melbourne move was responsible for my getting to know the Thames in London, the Rhine and Mosel in Germany with their backdrop of vines and castles, the Seine in Paris and its multitude of fine and romantic bridges, the Danube that waltzes through Vienna and charms the gypsies of historic Budapest, the Arno…

In the film The River (Le Fleuve) made in 1951 by that talented French filmmaker Jean Renoir, son of the painter Auguste Renoir, the narrator, a girl lingers by the river Ganges. She reflects by the river, meditates on the river and its influence on her life and finally she muses that they (she and her friends) might have lived on any river but if they had then “the flavour of the people who live by (that) river would have been different”. I concur — the river, the country, the climate…

The first European river that I came to know and to love was that Rhine river, or more correctly, to know in part. We landed in Frankfurt, picked up a car and drove to the Rhine and then along it to Koblenz and then down (or up, really) the Mosel and so into France. The Rhine with its amazing water traffic, its wonderful valley and its vineyards and its castles: what an introduction to Europe. We were there at the beginning of autumn and the weather, although comfortably warm, was also showery and we were impressed and delighted by the activity in the outdoor cafes. After a shower had ceased, the waitresses were on the scene as the last drop fell, mopping the tables, re-adjusting the chairs and making everything inviting for the hoped for customer. You had to stop for a drink or coffee or anything, there was no alternative. And when you sat at your table and looked upwards, there you saw the golden grapes and the changing colours of the leaves.

When we got to the Mosel the scene was even more elegant and the river smaller, but just as lovely. How easy it was to love both the Mosel and Rhine rivers.

The two rivers of France that stand out in my memory are the Rhone (near Condrieu) and the Dordogne (near Sarlat). The Rhone, by Australian standards, is simply immense and I whiled away the whole of one afternoon just sitting on the terrace of our hotel at Condrieu and watching the activities on that river.

What a mass of water: the width, the depth and the flow. Barges of half the countries of Europe thumped away out in the middle with gentle arcs peeling away from their prows and turbulent waters vainly trying to catch the sterns, and yet not far from where I sat there was a wooden fishing boat seeming almost becalmed with a cheerful fisherman casting a flimsy net supported by a mast and some complicated lines and poles. And on the bank almost under the terrace were two grizzled locals in old caps and workingmen’s blues with their Gitanes, by the smell of it, and they were patiently waiting for a bite on lines suspended from abnormally long and rather rustic-looking fishing rods.

When we first encountered the Dordogne a storm had just broken over us and the rain was so heavy that it was advisable to stop the car. We were able to do so by the river and we had a view of a limestone village high on the other bank, made all the lovelier by the intermittent curtains of rain.

But, returning to Australia, the river that I most wanted to see was the enigmatic and, perhaps, romantic Darling, the river whose history was so adequately portrayed by the Australian writer C. W. Bean in 1911. I bought his book The Dreadnought of the Darling in the 1960s and read it, and re-read it, but it took me until the twenty-first century before I actually got to the Darling. And what did I see? Well, sometimes it is the journey that matters.