Wattle reflections

Eltham, where I reside North East from Melbourne, is mostly soft clay, and its evocative panorama was painted by the early Impressionists.  

Prints are displayed along varied walking tracks to the Yarra River. 

It is home to many mud brick homes, artists and  writers. 

Due to suspended silt carried downstream from erosion and run-off, the Yarra River is known as "the river that flows upside down". 

I have composed a few rhymes to capture those aspects mentioned.

Warrandyte River Walk

Crunch of gravel underfoot

Dust baked on a river’s track

Yellow tree spray on display 

shimmer in the river’s eddies

Wind brings a haunting rhyme

Resounding chords of a lost dreaming

When sky turned black, when rains came

It washed away the old bush track

Camped by the river, 

on the plain or in the scrub

Tribes still remember a great flood

As their mother earth rebounds.
Game is plentiful-they dance again
To the tune of the great hunt.

Gone now like the first spring floods

Gone the nulla, the sling and the spear

Replaced by the gun

No longer
 

Yarra River & Eltham
Impressionists captured in scenes to behold-

a river panned in the quest for gold

The valleys, streams, the eucalypt scent

In verses free flowing from our poets lips.

The Bellbirds ring out in parks where we play and

the Magpies warble a carol each day

In gullies of wattle, under ghostly grey gums

From the tiny streams to the river beyond

As soil crumbles down the steep slopes

It joins the fast current, over sharp rocks

Down over rapids, flows upside down

Ever onwards over her sacred ground

Yarra Wattle

The river mirrors in the first spring rays

Wattle blooms in the morning haze

So Withers heeded nature’s spring call

In vibrant colors, captured natures fine lace

In rivers scenes that have stayed the course

Through war, through peace and all our strife

The colors, the refection’s, endless seasons repeat

And now Withers pictures, just prints on the banks

Put spring in our steps, wattle pride in this place