Reedy Swamp is like the purring motor of a timeless luxury car, a sort of Bentley of the natural ecosystem. You can keep your flashy Lamborghini Kakadu, with its bucket list rock art and waterfalls and crocodiles and its $10,000 price tag to spend a week of catered luxury with champagne sunsets — I’ll take Reedy Swamp any day, and not just because it’s in my backyard.
Reedy Swamp just keeps on ticking away through droughts and floods, and doesn’t ask for a luxury cruise with kangaroo marinated in wild lime to get noticed.
On the spur of a wild moment, Prince Finski and I swung right into Reedy Swamp Rd as we headed home after an urgent shopping trip to replenish our dwindling supply of chicken necks and Malt ’O’ Milk dunking biscuits.
I don’t know why we turned right. It was a bright blue late afternoon in spring just like any other bright blue late afternoon in spring and we were headed home to drink tea and think about freshening up the verandah ready for the warmer days of reading, licking, staring and tea drinking.
But we swung right up the little road and parked in a roped-off area still muddy after the rains. Perhaps it was the pull of the invisible moon, or just the flicker of a need to break the routine and do something different, but there we sat in the car park staring through the silhouettes of gums to watch ducks drift, swans glide and sunlight glint off the water into ephemeral pentagons of orange and yellow like it does in David Attenborough docos about the oases of the Serengeti.
Finski was restless behind his dog bars in the back of the station wagon. He stood up and started his hunch-back dance in the tiny space. He could sense something I couldn’t.
Age has calcified his inner ear bones and he’s now stone deaf, but biology always compensates; so as his aural world has shrunk his olfactory universe has expanded.
On his daily walks around Victoria Park Lake he nudges his nose into every passing bush and clump of native grass for any revelation of other lives — their habits, their travels, their diets.
As he stood panting in the back of the car he already knew there were millions of other lives out there in Reedy Swamp just waiting to reveal their olfactory selves.
He was right. But that was only the half of it — as soon as I opened the car door I was hit by a wall of sound bigger, deeper and more encompassing than any surround sound Lord of the Rings IMAX production.
Gurgles, chirps, bonks, honks, barks, maniacal cackles — and that’s just the frogs.
In the air and on the water there were squawks, yells, bells, short whistles, long whistles, screeches and scratchy throat gurgles.
The place was aural madness as life exploded into recreation — shouting at anything that might want to compete, eat or usurp its right to be and to live.
All this was lost on Finski as I opened the back of the car to let him out. But the scent of things was just as strong, as he nearly pulled my arm out of its socket to get to the long grass.
I ran after him, clutching his leather lead, as his head snuffled up and down and sideways to get the deeper message of this incredible place.
I looked down at his nose twitching in orgasm when there, right in front of it, was the dark, shiny tail of a tiger snake disappearing into the grass.
I did a little Irish dance and yanked his head away turning 360 degrees to walk very quickly in the opposite direction when I nearly stood on another young tiger enjoying his moment in the sun.
Reedy Swamp might be a shining jewel in our crown, but like all sacred and beautiful things of nature it comes with a warning: tread lightly or you’ll suffer.
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