It’s that time again.
The throbbing breaths of the living city have been grinding up against my temples. The car fumes bite at me like an adder that slithers through my sinuses. With each shriek of mechanised automation my heart is gripped and twisted into its own arrhythmia of anxiety. It’s when I feel the city becoming a bit too much that I know I need to return to the sanctuary of French Island. Since my return to Australia this place has been a unique oasis for me to inhabit. A refuge for me to swim amongst my own psyche.
I always enjoy the unique experience of getting to French Island almost as much as I enjoy being there. In particular the custom three carriage V-line that takes you from Frankston station to Stony point fills me with a quiet kind of excitement each time I rest on its crusted purple seats. It might be something to do with the fact you can smell the Diesel burning from inside the coach as the train idles at the platform but I always get this kiddish joy like I'm waiting on the tarmac before the plane is about to take off. Once I arrive at Stony point I exit the hydrocarbon hotbox and breathe deeply as the sea air envelops me. It's a decent wait till the next ferry but there's always stuff to see at Stony Point, deluxe fishing-boats constantly come in and out of the water, Rays hang by the fish-gutting tables eager to steal a bite before the pelicans do. I sit back and treat myself with a plain English muffin, the ferry will be here soon and I will be where I want to be.
French Island is a sanctuary of space not a vista of peaks, nor valleys. Here the currency are quiet sands backdropped by a vast sky, not mountains that leap and compete with the stars of the night. As I walk the 5km from the Jetty to the campsite the hills roll with me through swamps and forests. Hamlets of novel sightings open up around each new corner, a softly pouring stream there, a hungry stoned Koala there. As you walk the hour hike you may be lucky enough to run into a lone car on the few roads that take you from south to north. There are only 120 residents and 60 permanent inhabitants of French island, a fact made all the more interesting that up until recently~1% of the population of the Island was made up of people called Kylie Minogue. This little factoid is a stray meander off the main path to truly understand the inhabitants of French island. French island is an off the grid community. A woven basket of artists, farmers and hippies makes up much of the demographic of the town. It’s a sea-salted township where if you spend enough time at the only place to hang out, the lone general store, you see how everyone knows everyone on a first name basis. It’s quiet here and you get the sense that that is why people stay here.
Fairhaven is the name of the campsite I return to each time. It is its own tambark retreat whose beach opens out west to a retreating sunset each night. A can of cold soup, an English muffin and a cherished bottle of cider are what accompany me as I watch the orange light fade to black. The star-like speckles appear slowly at first, wandering in and out of my visual plane. I speculate their origins as to whether they stem from the depths of the cosmos or are noise from within the jellied lenses of my eyes. The sun leaves, the cold returns, it’s now time to rug up. Two pairs of pants, double socks, I lower myself into my sleeping bag ready to not leave my nest till the morning. On low tides of the Full moon with your window zipped wide you can hear the soft white noise of millions of soldier crabs diligently combing this night’s sand for a day's meal. It sounds like pop rocks sprawled across the kilometres of wilderness that surrounds me. I sink deep into my readings, close to my thoughts and closer to the heat of my body.
I always bring my diaries to the island for my torchlight sessions. I enjoy the path of embracing my own internal dialogue through cultivating private journal entries. Expressing my words underpins a large part of my own journey into the self, but as much as the act of expressing is so crucial to me, so too is reviewing these expressions. So on a cold night on my island of solitude I return to something familiar, my own words. The moon peers through the openings in my tent as my own patterns of thought are displayed before me. Mosaics of monologues and throughways of thoughts guide me as I weave between past and present perceptions of the self. Constant themes of gender of deep spiritual intuition rear their heads as I turn each page. Here isolated to the higher truths of the hermit I glow isolated in the soft hums of a glistening moon.
Morning always calls itself in the first light. A sealed bottle of Iced-coffee has been left for this moment, I return to the beach-front and stare out onto the water as I deliberate whether they will be running the ferry across today. French Island truly is a place unto itself, there are no roads to the mainland here, only the timetable of a local ferry behest of the coming and going of storming tides is what can take you back to shore. You should always pack another can of soup for when the winds come in hard you may have to spend another night.
There isn’t much to do on French Island but therein lies its charm. It’s a place to wander slowly, a place to bump into foraging echidnas or daze wide-eyed and transfixed by the ballets of migrating birds. In the reflected light of a distant moon I can reflect towards a distant sense of self. It’s a place off the beaten track, a place where each rock is saturated with circumspection and each shell overflows with revelation.
It’s somewhere quiet to listen to the hushed tones that speak through my India inked pages. These faint words and outlooks don’t call on from the outer but emerge instead from within. These pages are my divine manuscript and French island is where I pay tribute to them. An island of isolated actualization and limitless potential. An island I will call home for the night or at least until the ferries start running.
