Back of Beyond The NT: Mary River Catchment Pathways

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Thoreau, wrote over 150 years ago, thought and wrote that, "Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness — to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."

Henry David Thoreau, Walden - an annotated edition, 1854, Chapter 17, Verse 24.
[http://thoreau.eserver.org/walden00.html]

Today, 150 years later, as the villages expanded to cities and the wild has vanished except in nature reserves, it seems all the more important to test ourselves, to make our way even where there is no path. I sometimes manage to get off the well worn trail or the natural avenues created between different colonies of plant species. While there, I sometimes find as I tune into my surroundings I become lost in the moment and if I am lucky (right place, right time and facing the right direction) an event occurs which happens so swift, sometimes it seems almost imagined. When I re-run the event in my mind or reflect on it later, it seems these fleeting events allow us to become part of the” mysterious nature” we can never have enough of, which Thoreau thought and wrote about and connects the land to those who walked the land before us.
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Mary River Catchment Adjacent Open Woodland
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