I went camping on the weekend, up on the edge of the Wollemi Wilderness area.
I’ve never really been into the Blue Mountains, sure there are some nice looking rocks but the whole place is so utterly infested with people that I could never find it relaxing. I think I’m on the way to revising my opinion.
The Wollemi Wilderness is the largest wilderness area in NSW – a gigantic patch of nothing but gum trees and canyons. Deep Pass, where I camped, is a walk-in only campsite. There is a fire trail that takes you to within a kilometre of the site and then you have to walk down the side of the valley and along the bottom of a canyon to get to the site. The fire trail wasn’t marked on my map so I found it through a combination of GPS, luck, trial and error.
It’s worth it.
I could hear a wombat grazing from 50m away.
That was 50 metres of unsullied quiet.
Quiet is a threatened species. It requires large habitats and complex ecosystems.
Isn’t it Quiet that enables a word to be heard?
In fact, quiet plays its part, not only in enabling us to hear, but in constituting words in themselves, it is the spaces between words that gives them form.
Language is the interpenetration between silence and sound.
Ironically, wilderness areas which were declared to preserve vulnerable physical habitats from rapine human consumption, may end up being the last resort for the fraying edges of human quiet.
Quiet will camp in small tents in the remote wilderness,
without any form of power generation.
It will always have a billy ready beside the fire,
just in case someone should drop by for a bit of it.
And not particularly mind if they don’t.
Quiet lives within cooeee of the Burning Bush