There’s a light, a certain kind of light …
If you’re a Bee Gees fan and in the same reflective, middle-aged mood as myself, the next line will probably bring a twinge of melancholy. If you’re also Tasmanian, the “certain kind of light” will be a familiar friend. As I look across the valley, the familiar solitary yellow light on the ridge similarly brings me comfort this evening. Swatting the first mozzies of the season and listening to boobooks speaking across the distance to one another, I give an unseen, unacknowledged wave, and muse on what it is to be alone. I’m told by the disembodied voice of my car radio, that there are now an “unprecedented” number of us living alone, an ironic epidemic to that supposedly brought about by high-density pangolins and excessive social connectivity.
A couple of microbats shrill through my periphery and the usual lazy brushtail possum saunters by en route to the dog bowl. I look for the silhouettes of the wedge-tailed eagles that nest on that same ridge and often circle in the bowl between us, but am distracted by the muffled thump of pademelons and Bennett’s wallabies doing my gardening. One of these familiar souls I have regularly found sitting in quiet, squinty contemplation between the roots of a stringy bark, catching the first rays of the day. And I mean literally sitting – on its bottom with legs stretched out beneath, little arms resting on a fat buddha belly. I have named this diminutive sage, Zen Wallaby, and wonder if he has a name for me. Perhaps Rush Woman Walking.
Despite living in this town for more than a decade, I do not know the owner of the little yellow light. I know names and cars, distinctive voices outside the local café, who belongs to which dog, who last won the meat raffle and which faces match which post office boxes, but I do not know who it is I talk to at night across the valley. I wonder whether they’ve run out of their winter wood heap yet and whether their swallows have returned. Mine have not.
Welcome swallows (Hirundo neoxena) often choose to nest close to humans, repairing or rebuilding under the eaves of the same house year after year, so that generations may return to the relative safety of familiarity each spring. Swallows are quiet achievers of the highest order. For a creature no longer or heavier than a pen, their return northern journeys (equivalent to around 50 million lengths of their tiny bodies) are nothing short of remarkable. It is even more astounding that they do not need to do this. Populations of welcome swallows in Western Australia and New Zealand by comparison largely stay put over winter. Why all this striving and rushing seems to be peculiar to east coast Australian populations is largely unknown, but having grown up on the east coast of mainland Australia and been travelling up and down it ever since, something about their repetitive vertical compulsion makes sense to me.
Hirundo (“swallow” in Latin), is a straightforward enough translation, but the species name, neoxena, translates variously as “new stranger”, “hospitable guest” or “welcome warrior”. The word “welcome” in the common name comes from sailors, whose spirits were lifted at the sight of swallows, their presence signifying that land was not far away. Swallow tattoos are therefore a common nautical adornment, worn to represent homecomings or a symbolic promised return to a lover from across the seas.
Return they do, these pint-sized adventurers, in their thousands. It is curious how we note with great pleasure their progressive and joyous arrival and yet, typically, as we focus on the busy work of our daily lives, don’t notice their absence until long after they have departed.
A quick online search of the welcome swallow’s status reveals it to be both “widespread” and “secure”. This clearly highly successful bird obviously has much to teach me about belonging, as I continue to strive ineffectually for balance between the wide stretch of my wings and a need for security. Perhaps a tattoo might help? Several years spent outside of Australia, and with more than 20 countries under my wing, I am most assuredly a traveller, always curious as to what new experiences might lie over the next horizon. However, from my new post-pandemic angle, all this passport action seems like a dubious achievement. Whilst global galivanting has been undeniably enjoyable, and certainly provided some resilience and perspective changes, it has also put in stark relief how hollow life can look in the absence of something to fly back to, even if it’s a slightly broken, fur-lined mud sculpture, tucked under someone’s eaves.
. . .
Although Tasmanians escaped the worst of it by world standards, the past few years of Covid-19 and its iterations have seen us holed up in our houses in a way not experienced in my lifetime. I can’t help but feel that the (seemingly unrelated) scale and frequency of major personal challenges faced by many also seems to have ramped up a notch, as if the disease has been a global manifestation of individual turmoil occurring in homes and lives across the world, nudging us towards wakefulness.
Just within my own sphere, there have been multiple marital breakdowns, several brain tumors and other life-changing diagnoses, severe depression and anxiety, homelessness and radical relocations, life-altering accidents and emergencies, sudden (forced or otherwise) career redirections and, of course, death.
If there is a positive to come out of the pandemic, it is surely that it seems to have crystallised for many people what’s important. There was a period when I, having ventured out of the state, returned to a period of home isolation, and I discovered there is nothing like being told you can’t do something to make you want to do that very thing. Ordinarily, home is a sanctuary, but the first few days felt decidedly claustrophobic knowing I was not allowed to leave, and I wanted out. I was reminded again of my swallow friends, and recalled their extreme discomfort one particularly hot day, when the pre-flight chicks were literally cooking under my galvanized iron roof. One by one in their extreme discomfort, they ejected themselves from their mud brick oven, stumpy featherless wings flapping futilely as they made a surprisingly graceful, though only slightly buffered, two-storey descent. I went to see if they were OK, collecting each of the bewildered souls in my palm, their beaks gaping to let off steam. They seemed, in their wide-eyed relief to be saying, “Glad that’s over. Now what?” I placed them carefully in the shade of a log with a dish of water and checked on them regularly, although not as regularly as their anxious parents.
Fortunately, being surrounded by bush, I was still able to take long walks during lockdown, and it was common for me to glance and wave of an evening to my neighbor of the yellow beacon. I talked to them and shared my thoughts. Part of me perversely hoped that whoever they were, that they might also be in home isolation, which shamefully made me feel less lonely. Misery loves company apparently.
On about day four, I discovered a wild bee hive in the burned-out base of a stringybark, and sat down to watch their comings and goings. Hours passed. I returned the next day, and the next, and the next. Each day, the mood of the hive was different, whether due to weather, the whim of the queen or the vagaries of some unseen force to which I was not privy, I know not. The bees would change their flight paths and activity levels. The numbers of bees taking forays into the woods would vary. Some days they were interested in me and would come and land on me, perhaps curious as to the nature of this giant and ungenerous flower, other days not. I was fascinated. I lost time. What I found in return however was a curious connection, something to take me out of my head for a while. I found that I was far from alone; I had the bees, I had Zen Wallaby, I had the brush-tailed dog bowl thief, I had Bennett’s Backyard Blitz team.
I had the light on the hill.
. . .
It has taken me a couple of days on and off to write this, and it is with no small degree of ironic delight that from my deck this morning I noticed three small, agile and arrow-shaped bodies expertly catching insects mid-flight and inspecting the remains of last years’ mud huts. Some will not return this year, or ever, but others will come, bringing their young. They will, as in countless years before, encourage each other over far horizons, and lead the way home to safety. Such journeys cannot be taken alone. Whilst we must test the strength of our own wings, and encourage our young to do the same, we also need one another to show us where we belong, and once found, to fully inhabit that place.
I have never been more grateful to be Tasmanian, and even more so to be part of a small community of people who still wave to one another on the road and across the valley. It is a rare and beautiful thing in these times of epidemic loneliness.
So thank you, new strangers and hospitable guests. Thank you, tiny warriors. Welcome home.
Sonia Strong lives in the forested hills of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, having moved to Tasmania in 2005. She has worked in alpine and marine park management and conservation, more recently as a paramedic and wilderness ranger, and most recently as a metalsmith, writer and painter. Her favourite days are spent immersed in a creek looking for sapphires, exploring off track with her great dane, motorbike touring or in the sunshine with wine and friends. She has published several children’s books through Forty South, most recently “Tazzie The Turbo Chook Finds Her Feet”. You can follow her on Instagram, @soniastrongartist.
