I know all the tracks and their tyre-marked pits around this place, and the burnt-out hulks of trees that somehow still stand grey and black against the sky.
I know all the pathways through the grassy clumps leading off the tracks to the little open spaces that are good places for a rest or a think.
I know all the billabongs and their different characters.
Some are quiet and hidden with gentle sandy slopes.
Others are brash and stark with black water and glittering reflections edged by dead and spiky silver wattle branches.
Others are dark pools with a mysterious silence about them.
All this can be captured in one neat phrase — a sense of place.
I’ve been walking these river plain tracks around my home in north Shepparton every day for 30 years.
For me, they offer not just contact with nature, but they are also a deep well of memories.
I have walked them with eight different dogs over three decades and if I close my eyes, I can still see each one running through the grass ahead of me.
Similarly, I have walked them with my children and their friends, and now I walk them with my grandchildren.
Up ahead, I can see the track leading to the end of the long, serene billabong.
The surface was once a carpet of lilies, where Rockboy and his little mates devised their own game of quoits by seeing how many twigs and pebbles they could land on one leaf.
There’s the log we used to sit on and watch for turtles to surface.
Over there in the long grass at the edge of the riverbank is where Petgirl once asked me, “Where do you think God lives?”
Of course, I told her God lives right here among the trees and the grass and water.
I rarely see anyone else on my walks, and if I do, I feel a sense of invasion. I pass them with a curt nod.
However deep I feel my connection is to this place, I know it only be wafer thin compared to the bond that First Nations people must feel.
And I can’t call this pristine bush — you can see the evidence of historic hubris everywhere, from ripples of barbed wire across fallen trees to the powdery concrete footings of vanished constructions.
Nevertheless, the stories these trees and tracks contain are mine and nobody else’s.
The surprising thing about this patch of ground is that even after walking it for three decades — it still holds surprises.
I’ve seen this bend in the river a thousand times — but this morning there is a thin band of mist floating six inches off the surface.
I’ve come across snakes sunning themselves on sandbanks and mobs of kangas bounding through the trees in the distance like silent ghosts.
This morning the light looks clear and sharp like cut glass. Yesterday it was thick like warm honey.
I think everyone has a sense of place.
Lucky people find it at home.
Others have to travel a long way to find it, even climbing into jet planes with big bags and going through customs to find it.
I feel like I’ve won the ‘place lottery’ every day because I find mine by stepping out of my back gate.
Some of us have more than one sense of place.
A lifetime ago, my place was among the bluebells of Welsh woodlands or the lonely dunes of Somerset beaches. But they are too far away in time and distance now.
Call me a boring stick in the mud — what a wonderful image — but I just don’t enjoy travelling.
I travel every day from my verandah through the bush and back again to my books, my guitar and my paintings.
There, I find enough Instagram moments to break the internet without pushing through the crowd.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.
