A Bush Outing In a Hard Year
by Rob McIntyre
The blackberries formed a 20 feet high solid wall when my old man, Pete, found our pocket of Yarra-side flood plain land. It was bought unserviced, inaccessible and essentially unseen. He may have been possessed of some extraordinary vision for the potential it held, but I doubt that he could have foreseen the pleasure my mate Jim Woods recently felt while gracefully rowing Beverly off our dock and gliding upstream through tranquil bushland in the middle of inner urban Kew.
A moments respite from the chafing chains of lockdown. Inundation is a terrible thing. Childhood recollections of thick gooey coatings of Eltham mud, gasping carp flapping in the last stinky puddles as the floodwaters receded, these are memories still vivid for me.
When the low laying Barn was being configured into my boat shop, 30 year old mud deposits high overhead on newly exposed noggings pricked my memory. The full implication of committing my tools, and any unfinished builds caught on the strongback, to a soggy destruction in the next flood event, gave me real pause. I built Jim’s 17 foot Oughtred Acorn with one eye on the sweep of the shear and one eye on the weather map. But she made it. Generational flooding rains hit Gippsland, NSW and Queensland during her construction, but not the Yarra Valley. The day of reckoning must be arriving during the next project, or on some stormy night when I least feel like tumbling out of a warm bed. I am living with a rolling dice. Some days, when a winter sun angles into the open doors and the stove crackles as offcuts get tossed straight from the saw into the fire, the gamble seems more than worth it. It has been a long time since the last flood, but the nagging threat is always there.
Meanwhile, nature on the peaceful riverbank gives no acknowledgment of the Covid storm swirling around us. An absence of rowers and their bank-eroding coaching boats, has meant an extraordinary rebound of birdsong and wildlife. Booming numbers of exercising walkers on the bike path now gawk as Salvatore, our huge resident fur seal, slaps his giant carp catch on the surface. I would think that many are having their appreciation of the river honed to a new level. Charles Grimes, first white invader to see this part of the Yarra in 1803, had landed where my boat shop now stands and from where Beverly recently set out. He made a Diary entry noting a giant shell midden on the flat. Imagine that... the Yarra offering an endless supply of oysters for the taking. Not so endless as it turns out. Even as a youngster I had acute awareness of the depredations of riverside industrial pollution. You had to have seen the nasty foaming chemical residue, bobbing oil drums, sheep carcasses and tons of street waste floating by to have a proper appreciation of how badly the river was treated through the fifties and sixties and how much things have improved. You can thank The Age and their ‘Give-the-Yarra-a-Go’ campaign for the turnaround. They went out on a limb when no one else appeared to give a shit. If only the current Murdoch press were so selflessly motivated. Jim wanted a boat to row and sail, one that he could take along on the deck of the Margaret Pearl, his beautifully restored wooden cray boat. His vast boating experience has given him a trained eye, the Acorns widely appreciated superb lines an obvious choice. The demands of my Architects life allow little time for my passions on the side, however Covid has shaken the tree a little. I managed to negotiate a sabbatical boatbuilding year. Beverly suddenly become a real project.
A surreal year it certainly was, although, if you are going to be locked down, it might as well be in a cosy workshop with a pile of plywood to scarph and a roll of lovely Oughtred drawings. The reality of what a world pandemic meant hit home most when epoxy paint became unobtainable in the colour white. As it turns out, the stretched 17 foot version of Acorn is a tender and truly demanding boat to sail, wickedly fast to row, and such a joy to look at that she stops people dead in their tracks. She was finished in time for the inaugural Clinker Cup, scoring race wins on her first public outing. Movement restrictions tightened. Long dreamed-of sailing trips were cancelled. Resorting to a bit of rowing up the Yarra in the 5 km radius seemed a fairly dismal last option. I don’t think Jim realised how affecting this would turn out to be.
Upstream from us is one short but truly lovely stretch of the River. It starts at the old turning basin, a man-made widening that formed the upper reach of early commuter ferry services. After that the river narrows and passes a rocky outcrop with turbulent eddies below. With the Collingwood Children’s farm on the left and the Yarra Boulevard high on the cliff on the right, the bush here seems totally untouched by Melbournes surrounding presence. It’s a bit of a shock. He rowed back down to the dock excited and moved. Maybe Charles Grimes felt like this, he didn’t say. Perhaps this is the era of close-to-home micro exploration, for making the best of what is possible. For lovers of boats, there is still, if you haven’t been there yet, unexplored territory.