Grass

Penny Dunstan 

There are consequences of the old ways with which I feel easiest: walking as enabling sight and thought, rather than encouraging retreat and escape; paths as offering not only means of traversing space, but also of ways of feeling, being and knowing.  
Robert Macfarlane, the Old Ways: a journey on foot. Penguin 2012, p24.

 To dwell in Australia is to dwell with deep time. I feel time thick and sticky as I walk, my feet meeting earth along the paths that have always been walked upon. Although Australia is often thought of as a young country, always there are traces of the old ways. The old civilisation that came before colonisation still exists in memory and in fact. The grindstone resting at my front gate. A scared tree next to a river bank. A stone all-purpose knife sitting on top of a dam bank in a four-times reworked mine site. And indigenous crops. Grasses. Tall. Holding their grain and waiting for harvest. I rub the awns of Weeping grass (Microlaena stipoides) between my hands to liberate the grain in the same way as one does for wheat (Triticum aestivum, Triticum durum).  The raw grain is nutty to taste, but I have never collected enough to bake into a loaf in the fire coals as the old people did before. If I were to walk without the knowledge that I am on Wonnarua country, I would puzzle over the remnants of the old ways. But since I know, the very air sings with old time and old ways of understanding. 

 I walk my way into the grass-world with my dog. The earth pushes up to greet me bearing gifts of grass seeds and bindiis (Soliva sessilis). The grass seeds make their way through my boot eyelet holes to bury themselves in the flesh of my ankle. The binidiis spike into the paws of the dog. We stop. One paw, three seeds.  

 It is a windy wet afternoon. A woman with dark skin and dark hair strides through the Kangaroo Grass (Themeda triandra)-clad road embankment and slows to walk beside me. She is made of dark swirling fog and her shoulder length hair bounces as she walks. Warm, light rain wafts around us. My dog walks determinedly in front, leash stretched to the maximum. Time has collapsed. Old and new are meeting. She turns her head to speak to me. Why do you walk this funny way?

 My head is full of lockdown art. Zoom painting groups. Pre-covid painting lessons. And a deadline for an exhibition at Curve Gallery in Newcastle. I have nothing finished. It’s starting to really bother me that I have too many choices.  What is my new mentor talking about? How do I answer? My mentor reads my mind. This is not the path you know, she says as she leaves me, crossing the road to stride her way through the trees towards the Williams River. 

 The dog and I turn to walk home. What path? An old path? I know that my house is built on an old meeting ground. There is a spring near the top of the hill and I have found two grind stones. It was and is a sheltered place to meet under the lee of an east facing hill where the westerlies cannot reach. There must be lots of paths that lead to the meeting place.  Making my way back by the treed small rural blocks I puzzle about her words. And then as I round the corner into my driveway, I understand her advice. Choose the path you know.On the side of the long drive way, a crop of Microlaena stipodies waves to me. Choose the path you know. I am an agronomist, interested in soils and plants. And an indigenous grain crop is waving to me. 

The grass swooshes in the breeze, its full grain seed heads curling over to knee height. My drive way grass, home to quail, lizards and mice, cloaks the ground with food and forage. I have done nothing but not mow it. Underground vast networks of grass roots, with their mycorrhizal fungi extensions, feed worms, bacteria and other small lifeforms in turn feeding the soil and trees. Mantle of green, grass of plenty: the old ways speak of perennial Indigenous agriculture. Old time flows into present day. I know what to make now.