January Musings

Yuma Friends,

Happy New Year! Happy Solar New Year!

Thank you for joining me here in 2026. It is a delight to squirrel away these pockets of time with you. I'm so grateful you're still taking time with my little newsletter. The title, “the Crepuscular Hour” comes from a twice-daily phenomenon: the light just before sunset and just after sunrise. 

Some peoples’ email browsers aren’t loading all the images, links, and videos in the posts. If that’s you, you can also click through to the web version of this newsletter. 

For those of you who prefer my sexy voice to the tyranny of reading, you can find the audio version of the newsletter here.

Prescription for thirst without end: swim in a gorge

The thirst never seems to abate. January sucks the moisture from my body, from the land. My swelling middle, tongue, mind. Parched. I have said, over and over, that I feel like Tiddalik. And the frogs here seem to agree. They strand themselves all over our house, needing to be ushered out. Some return to desiccate themselves on our brick floor. I don’t know whether their tiny shriveled bodies are a performance of sympathy for my thirst, or whether they are an omen of something more sinister. We put them in the compost. I go to swim in the gorge. 

I see why they call the heat of the day muggy: it mugs me. Everything is in hot stillness, only the lizards and the dragonflies move, skimming and skittering around me.

At Molonglo Gorge, I feel as if I am in a sacred place. All these little green placid pools. Walking along the gorge edge, I see all the familiar signs of medicine: kunzea, usnea, cassinia. So much green. So many colours of green. A quilt of greens. Veriditas.

There are signs of wounding here too, where are the old stag trees? Where are the grasses? I just read in a Pico Iyer book that "to bless" comes from the French "blessure", to hurt.This place here is both wounded and blessed.

The river, when I am in it, is the warm of shallow water. The surface is cool, but immediately underneath it is warm again. The cold returns only in the undercurrent. It's the blue hour, and the ripples in the water are high contrast. Tiny fish nibble at my feet, then when I go in deeper, my legs; arms; belly. At one point, I am a moveable feast: dozens of fish nipping at my legs. The water is silky. I can hear crickets in the distance, and something that I think might be a boobook. I can hear the rustle of air through reeds. 

My sore, pregnant feet are tired from six kilometres of walking up and down hills. These river rocks are a massage, a balm. I can feel my heartbeat slowing. My breath, lazy. When I lie back in the water, a shiver runs through me at the same time as the train runs overhead. To the passengers, I must look like a pregnant lady of shallot in activewear. My stomach gurgles, another telltale sign of the body releasing. The words for this river on this day: ripples, generous, luscious, vital, sussurus.

Are all water sources sacred? My hunch is yes.

Other Good Things

I recently had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with my friend, and Canberra art luminary, Mary Kayser. Canberra locals may know Mary for her big commissions, including the ANCA gates Transition (1992–1993), Resting Place of the Dragonfly (1989), Chrysalis (1988), and the Aranda Playing Fields Mural (2020). 

There is a lot to love about Mary’s work: she shows a rare material mastery and sensitivity. This sensitivity is evident in the subtle welds that characterise her many steel artworks, it’s evident in it’s evident in the polished jarrah wood that weaves through many of her sculptures, and to me, it’s particularly evident in the near-geographic buffalo hide she folds into her installations. I particularly love her piece Please Sit, a chair made from buffalo hide draped over welded steel. Its contours and crevasses mirror those of the Kunama Namadgi/Snowy Mountains: the landscape the work references. 

Mary’s next show is my annual favourite: the Sharing Stories Arts Exchange group show, showcasing work made over a year of cultural exchange with Aboriginal Custodians. You should absolutely go if you’re in the Canberra area. The dates are Thu 12 Feb 2026, 10:30 am - Fri 27 Feb 2026, 3:00 pm, and the opening is Wed 11 Feb, 5:30pm. Mary’s work will be there alongside other excellent Canberra artists I follow, such as Julie Monro-Allison.

Always was, always will be (Aboriginal Land)

This heatwave is something out of nightmares. The grass crunches underfoot. Ripe berries dry on the vine. Fires crop up everywhere. We walk only in the relative cool of the crepuscular hours.

I am thinking constantly of water, fire, and soil. I am thinking constantly of the dams and rivers that act as firebreaks lying empty and cracked.

At a meeting of the Fenner Decolonial Yarning Circle this week, many spoke of water bodies they had loved and watched dry up.

I am thinking about the ways that Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have always protected waterways, helping to shape them with wetlands and mangroves that protect them, even when scorching times come.

I am thinking about my friends and ecoacoustic collaborators wiradyuri scientist kate harriden, and water economist Paul Wyrwoll, who work together on the crises facing Canberra's waterways. When we meet to listen to the river, we share crises: they tell me about the water crisis, and I tell them about the soil crisis. I am watching the cracked clay emerge from the edges of the shrinking dam outside my study window. The soil, water, fire crises are so bitterly intertwined. Paul told me on Wednesday that the Murray Darling's days might be numbered. He works hard to bring the water crisis into public discourse, and we all worry that by the time we start talking about water reform, it may be too late.

I am thinking about the work that kate does on aqua nullius. How she works hard to explain to us that all these waterways are kin to traditional custodians, who never ceded this custodianship. How, if we were to listen to Indigenous water custodians and scientists, they might have most of the solutions we need to save our sorry, bone-dry asses. I am praying for rain. I am praying for petrichor. I am praying we learn to listen.

You can hear lovely interview with kate on aqua nullius and water management here.

Mutual Aid

I am the one who needs aid! Please help me! In order to spend as much time as possible with our incoming baby, Kass and I have decided to rent out our house. It is a very nice house.

It has four bedrooms, two quite large, two small (we use the small ones for offices), a massive kitchen, and two living areas. We are renting house-only, which means that we will still be managing the majority of the land for our tenants (with plenty of notice for each landcare visit, of course). Alongside Nicola and Sam, who live elsewhere on the property, tenants will have shared use of: two dams, 20 acres of regenerating bush, an established vegetable garden, an orchard, extensive ornamental native garden, the local public paths. We are offering a lease of 1-2 years, but are prepared to go shorter for the right person. It is a 20-minute drive from Watson, 30 from ANU (approx 40-45 for parking). Indoor cats only, and the land can only support maximum one more dog (and the dog must not chase other animals, and must get on with Hank, our resident doggy sweetheart). 

We’re asking $900 p/w, although we may be prepared to go lower for keen beans who need a leaner price. We are also open to renting out half the house (three bedrooms, one bathroom, one living area) for ~$450-500 and sharehousing. Move-in would be mid-late April, although we could organise interim housing with us for tenants who needed it more urgently (at a substantial discount). 

Please share widely! We are devoted to the Country here, and really want someone else who loves it to live on it.

If you or a friend has a mutual aid request, please send it to me by mid-February. This is your space too.

Thank you,

If you feel moved by anything in this newsletter, and want to forward it to a friend, or share it on social media, that would genuinely help my practice grow.

Love and solidarity,

Flo Sophia Dacy-Cole