My place in the mud
A colourful garden is my happy place: flowers all year round, with a mix of natives and hardy perennials. That’s why the drab, olive-green of the monochromed local mangroves has been slow to attract my attention. I have lived or worked on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, Australia for twenty-five years. I have walked the Hastings foreshore countless times; Warringine Park and the Bittern Coastal Wetland Boardwalk feel like my front yard. Wanders and rambles, buckets and bikes with grandchildren, husband jogging, rehab walking after surgery. Little ones afraid to fall off the boards in case something lurks underneath in the dank swamp.
When the grandchildren were small, we loved to go to Jacks Beach when the tide was out, equipped with gumboots, towels and snacks. Down across the sand we would creep in the gluggy mud. Then it was a game: how far can we walk without water or mud getting inside our boots or sinking and screaming for help? It felt a little dangerous and not something they were usually allowed to do, but as they grew older and more confident, we could wade right out to where the mangroves ended, and the sea took over. We would get quite close to the old wooden piles from an ancient pier, rotted but surviving the salt and waves. The children cautiously skirted the holes in the mud, wondering what creatures might emerge from them. Confirming their apprehension, tiny crabs scuttled in their sideways fashion as we squelched towards them.
I explained that these plants were mangroves, and that the pencil-sized upright growths were their roots seeking oxygen. They found little sprouted seedlings floating in their green split pockets and we began to explore. The mangroves at Jacks Beach are relatively small but were taller than the children and felt shadowy and threatening; we tried to teach them to respect the environment. When Covid lockdowns penned us into a small radius in Melbourne, Jacks Beach was fortuitously included in my area and walks down there saved my sanity through that nightmare.
In my Geography studies at Melbourne University in the sixties (yes, last century), we did some field work at Corner Inlet, to the east of the ‘neck’ of Wilson’s Promontory. Squelching then, as we do now, we waded through the mudflats, mapping the vegetation of the coastal tidal area and the mangrove swamps. We learnt how to record and sketch the vegetation profile along an imaginary line, to be drawn and later researched from our photos, hoping to accurately capture the ecosystem that we had explored and documented. No internet then.
I particularly enjoyed hand drawing the swamp vegetation, using pens on tracing parchment, followed by research and detailed labelling of species. Computers and mobile phones had not even been imagined, but the wetlands had always been in this remote corner and were already ancient. That excursion is a long time ago, but I have retained a sense of relationship with mangrove swamps, despite the mystery they encapsulate. Even as a youthful uni student, eco-geography appealed to my view of the environment and its interaction with human development – my sense of place.
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