Tell me this – have you ever taken drugs? Yes? No? The answer depends on one’s definition, but I’ll bet that many of you will admit to dabbling in some form of stimulant. We are, as a society, obsessed with them. Dark aromatic shots of plant extracts; delicate paper tubes delivering wafts of nicotine; colourful vessels of molten sand filled with fermented fruit juice; little polyethylene baggies carrying a fine dust of crystalline tropane alkaloids. We have employed all our ingenuity in search of a high.

Why? Let me give you my theory. I think our craving for stimulants is an attempt to the replace the pulses of endorphins that once accompanied our daily rambling in the wilds. I can honestly say that nature has given me by far the biggest highs of my life. I’ve stood at the edge of Mt Meg’s spectacular granite bluffs, with blood coursing and nostrils flaring, and believed that I could soar off if only I had the courage to jump. I’ve perched atop dunes of the Big Desert and felt my skin tingle with awe. I’ve stood waist deep in the Merri Creek with a full moon overhead and frogs calling all around, and been so fulfilled that if I’d slipped into the murky depths at that very instant, I would have died happy.

My most recent of these experiences was also the most profound. It was March 2011. La Niña had just prized southern Australia loose from El Niños’ grasp, bringing rain and plenty of it. The Murray-Darling catchment, wilting and gasping after ten years of drought, was reborn. Floods spread across every inch of the basin, coalescing at the junction of the Murray and Darling Rivers in Victoria’s north-west. With haste, my old friend Jeremy Tscharke and I packed the car and headed north to glimpse the spectacle. What we found eclipsed even our wildest dreams. 

Land that two years before was literally dying of thirst was now heaving with life. Supposedly long dead Red Gums re-sprouted in effervescent green. Wetlands that we presumed had seen their last flood years before now brimmed with fish and turtles. Frogs reclaimed the flood plain in such numbers that one had to be careful where they placed their feet. It was stunning, and a truly humbling experience.

The climax was a sunset that Jeremy and I will never forget. We’d headed up a flooded Lindsay River in search of ‘Big Red’ – a Red Gum of gargantuan proportions we’d seen previously on aerial imagery. We found her just as the sun dipped below the western horizon. The sky progressed through golden, to pink and eventually to deep violet. As we marveled at this great tree, we talked about the history it had seen. Big Red would already have been a towering giant when Captain Cook sailed up Australia’s eastern seaboard. She could well have sheltered families of Aboriginal people from inclement weather, and her hollow limbs must have once been home to regionally extinct marsupials. Undoubtedly, she has seen scores of floods of the scale of the 2011 epic. This tree was, quite simply, a living piece of history that we could touch and caress and imbibe. We had found our Totem, and returned to camp with a sense of bliss that no substance could ever hope to replicate.

Dwarfed by Big Red. A little shaky, but steady hands are hard to come by under this beauty. Photo: J. Tscharke

Bliss I. Photo: J. Tscharke

Bliss II. Photo: J. Tscharke

Bliss III. Photo: J. Tscharke