Musings, October 2026

Yuma,

Welcome to the Crepuscular Hour: the liminal spaces of dawn and dusk. Thank you for meeting me here. 

Speaking of liminal spaces, Happy Halloween. I hope that your week has been full of ancestor connection and treats.

For those of you who prefer to be lulled by the lilt of my voice, here is the recording of this newsletter

For us, this month has been bookended by another liminal space: water. By tiny hands splashing seriously in hot springs and rivers. The solemn face of a being for whom splashing is not fun, but pedagogy. 

The Metung Hot Springs

The Metung hot springs, a somatic account

Some places simply tell you: sacred

Bubbles settle on your skin. Prosecco your legs, hairs, fingernails. 

Birds centimetres from our heads. 

Honeyeater takes a dip in the pool. Fluffy feathers drying in the sun. 

While my own body is settling, you, my baby, are excitement. You chitter away. 

Between you and the birds, I thrill. Sharp joy that floats alongside my loosening, 

You offer your gummy smile to your dad, and my throat and chest fill with yellow light. 

The Metung Hot Springs: a matrescent account 

I matresce. 

I am (w)hol(l)y un

done by the way that droplets of water settle

across your cheeks.

A mineral account

Balneotherapy. Thallasotherapy.

Water seeped into ground, finding faults and fractures. Moving downwards for maybe 4,000 years.

Water returns remineralised,

boron, calcium, chloride, magnesium, potassium, sodium.

A diaspora account

On the podcast, Blindboy is telling me about Irish mineral springs.

How the medicine of these springs was so strong in Irish culture that 

archaeologists can tell which boroughs of New York had high levels of Irish immigrants from the soda water bottles left behind. 

How they were so thirsty for their healing springs, they filled the middens of these neighbourhoods with a cheap simulacra.

And you. My redheaded blue-eyed baby. 

In these waters I watch

your cradlecap soften, begin to dissolve.

A floral account

Wildflower season so inflorescences of

wattle, hardenbergia, prostanthera, indigofera, jasmine, eucalyptus

cast shadows on the water.

An extraction account

And of course, it started with puncturing. 

Crude oil struck at Metung in

1929. 1436 feet. Of drilling.

In the photos, steam rushing out of the oil bore.

A colonial account

“Middens, artefact scatters, hearths, ancestral remains, campgrounds, story places known from oral traditions, massacre sites, meeting places, and ceremonial grounds all lie within a few metres of the coastal edge.”

Unceded Country. Tatungalung Country. 

Lake custodians. Island custodians. 

Continuous shell deposits.

Swan-egg eaters.

Tat meaning sea. Tat meaning south. 

The Gippsland Massacres, at least fourteen between 1840 and 1850. 

Anthropologist describing the Tatungalung in 1904, 

uses the following language to characterise his publication:

"marking out our prospecting claim." 

Everywhere, prospecting. Everywhere, mining. Everywhere steam rushing out of an oil bore. 

The Metung Hot Springs, a fuller account

Some places simply tell you: sacred

Unceded Country. Tatungalung Country.

Tat meaning sea. Tat meaning south. 

Lake custodians. Island custodians. 

Water moving downwards for maybe 4,000 years.

Remineralised: boron, calcium, chloride, magnesium, potassium, sodium.

The Irish, so thirsty for their healing springs, they filled the middens of their neighbourhoods with a cheap simulacra.

And here, a simulacra of natural hot springs fissure. 

Here, steam rushing out of the oil bore.

Everywhere, mining. Everywhere, unceded Country. 

And also honeyeater takes a dip in the pool. 

And also you, my baby, are excitement.

You offer your gummy smile to your dad, and my throat and chest fill with yellow light. 

the way that droplets of water settle

across your cheeks.

What Country is doing right now

Swollen with water. Rain pulses. A soaking. 

Efflorescent. Giddy with flowers. I catch a tiger moth, utheisia pulchelloides, on the last of the narrow-leaf bitter-pea, daviesia leptophylla.

Matrescence

I matresce. Grant deadlines, writing application deadlines, slip past unheeded. You have learnt to use your hands, and I awake to the pendulum of your tiny fist swinging around the bed. Your wildness awakens my own: we chatter in your language. I do my weighted squats with you, you laugh uproariously. You redistribute minerals: salt water crystals drying around your eyes after tears. You soak us both during your bath: splashing with utter seriousness.

Thank you, 

This past Wednesday, I became a doctor. I completed my PhD feeling further from my practice than when I began. The creative arts world can feel quite unrewarding. Even when one is doing quite “well”, even when one is getting paid, it can often cost more (in time, in emotional energy, in materials) than the remuneration. Unaligned work can feel deeply draining: an emotional, intellectual, and financial loss. I left the PhD feeling exhausted and unaligned. 

I left the PhD with a hunger to do simple, somatic ethnoecological writing. I had been holding onto that hunger, and waiting to do that work for five years. This newsletter has been my first baby splashes in that direction. I can feel the shape of a practice opening up. 

I’m grateful to you for giving me some of your time each month. For letting me experiment with a research-creation practice that holds my passion and attention. 

Thank you,

Love