Our Isolation Camino

In Australia, in this time of isolation, all travel is banned. Marooned at home, we find ourselves yearning for the long-distance paths of Spain. Alluring, elusive, unattainable. Until a challenge goes out, to walk the Camino Inglés wherever you are in the world. A spark is ignited. We decide to walk it and transition, step by step, out of our state of restless confinement. 

The Camino Inglés, the shortest route to the holy city of Santiago de Compostela, is just 120 kilometres long and usually walked over five days. Once, medieval seafaring pilgrims started in the port city of Ferrol and journeyed through the lush green countryside of rural Galicia to the city walls of Santiago. We plan our own 120-kilometre route to walk over five consecutive days, through and beyond Melbourne’s celebrated inner suburbs. 

Like the Camino Inglés which skims the coast before meandering through the hinterland to Santiago, we’ll take in the sea, travelling along creeks and rivers before arriving, not in Santiago, but home where we started as if to know the place for the first time.

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The Northern Trail (30 km) 

Ibis in flight. We follow them northwards, along the Merri Creek. Flooded in parts after three days of heavy rain. The trail busy this fine Sunday morning. Gentlemen cyclists in tweed jackets, dog walkers, children on scooters. Families out together exploring the unknown natural world close to home; a serendipitous consequence of lockdown restrictions.

The day still. The light soft. The cupolas of the Russian Orthodox cathedral glowing golden. Traditional Arabic calligraphy spray-painted on the Islamic Museum of Australia’s water tanks. Trees scarred where bark was carved out to make canoes, shields and coolamons. Ancient places of ceremony held within a eucalyptus woodland. 

Kookaburras, lorikeets, wattlebirds, sulphur-crested cockatoos. A cacophonous orchestra. The weir after rain, rushing with water. Beyond Coburg Lake, the world opens and the track quietens. We enter a realm that feels distant from the enclosed urbanness of the lower reaches of the creek. Grassy banks concealing what lies in the folds of the land. Broad expanses of grasslands to the west. Young boys out alone, tough edged and wild of spirit, like the landscape.

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We take a diversion through the pale-brick streets of Reservoir. A locked mosque. An occasional front yard gardener. Another walker, our friend Robert, joins us as we veer south-westerly. A drift of black swans at Edgars Creek. Once, in the old world, all swans were believed to be white and black swans became a metaphor for major, impactful events that lay outside the realm of expectation. The coronavirus pandemic may well be remembered by history as the black swan of 2020. 

On to Edgars Creek Trail, crossing the creek on precariously balanced rocks a footfall above the cold, swift-flowing water where once the Wurundjeri people gathered freshwater yabbies and trapped migrating eels. Losing the track, then regaining it. A bend in the creek reveals an impressive eight-metre high sandstone cliff and basalt outcrops, the edge of the lava flow of an ancient volcano.  

We wind our way through the rewilded Edgars Creek parklands to Coburg, where one creek flows into another and we find ourselves back on the Merri Creek trail. It’s even more crowded now. A tangle of Sunday afternoon strollers, kamikaze children on recently acquired bicycles, some of them braving the sloping walls of the Brunswick Velodrome. One young girl stops to ask about our walking poles. What are they? What do they do? Why are you using them? Satisfied with our responses, she declares the poles ‘cool’ and takes off on her shiny-pink bike. 

The sun low in the sky, sunflowers turning back towards the east. We amble homewards, past the last surviving market garden on the creek, farmed by Chinese and Italian gardeners for over 150 years and now an Inner North certified organic farm. Looking forward to a cold beer to ease our weariness and toast the captivating 30-kilometre day. 

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The Southern Trail (25 km)

To reach the sea, our ambition for the day. Past a wall of dusky pink roses and russet vine leaves. Willy wagtails and red-rumped parrots finding food in the same soft, damp earth. We turn south along the swollen Merri Creek, bridges just clearing the muddy rush of water, a tangle of flood debris caught in the narrow margin between surefootedness and jeopardy.  

Words on a red-brick wall. Yaluk for creek. Wiin for fire. Darrang for tree. A stone labyrinth, a classic Cretan design dating from 1200BC. The ancient practice of walking into the centre and out again to ground and balance oneself a balm in these unsettling times. Alongside the labyrinth, a wishing tree strung with entreaties. I wish everyone calm and inner peace. I wish for roller skates. I wish to have no errors or issues with my laptop. 

Plantings of graceful wattle, banksia, rock correa and wallaby grass. An enveloping green tunnel of trees. A memorial, a gold-inscribed marble shamrock for a young Irishman killed in a random assault in 1997. Violence and beauty held in the same landscape. 

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Water swirling around rocks. A kayaker manoeuvring his craft through the obstacle course at Dights Falls where the creek loses itself to the river. Art telling of the Wurundjeri creation story. The clear day clouding and as we near the Children’s Farm, mist drifting through the valley. Medlars and quinces ripening. Both fruits too hard and astringent to eat raw, but transformed to ruby wondrousness by the alchemy of cooking. Past sheep and beehives and the Abbotsford Convent, closed due to COVID-19 and as eerily quiet as it was before it became a thriving heartland of art, culture and learning.

Yellow-tailed black cockatoos and a crackling rain of pine cones. The rich, acrid smell of roasting barley wafting up from the brewery. Boats moored at private jetties. The Yarra River widening and lined with deciduous trees turning amber. A more exotic landscape than the Merri Creek which is being transformed back to a natural habitat with mass plantings of indigenous vegetation. 

Continuing along the Yarra Trail to Burnley Park where we chat to two eight-year-old boys, out roaming by themselves and stopping when something catches their attention. Bees that have colonised a corroboree tree. Fallen logs whose hollows might be hiding lizards. Sticks bigger than themselves standing in as swords for these young errant knights.

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To Cremorne and through its quiet streets to South Yarra and Fawkner Park. Sloping green lawns and empty playing fields. An avenue of Moreton Bay Fig Trees. A kookaburra resolutely holding on to the worm it is extracting from the earth. 

The city reflected in the still waters of Albert Park Lake. A sense of arrival when we reach the shoreline of Port Phillip Bay and walk the length of St Kilda Pier to its iconic Edwardian pavilion. 

Taking in the salt air and the silver light of the sea and sky. A Pacific gull atop a stranded pylon. The beach closed due to social distancing laws. A plane in the sky, something so rare of late that it stops us in our tracks. Along St Kilda foreshore, past West Beach, Sandbar Beach and on to Kerford Road Pier where we roam for a while with a couple of boys before we travel home via the city. The air is strangely clear and the city sharp at this distance. Trams and trains that should be jam-packed are empty even of ghosts.  

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The Northeastern Trail (29.2 km)

Early morning fog. A train to Epping, the carriage again bereft of people. Sheoaks growing in stands by the rail line. On a less gentle day, the trees wail as the wind passes through their long, wiry leaves. A bus to East Woolert, close to where the Darebin Creek rises in the north and follows a general southerly route for close to 30 kilometres to where it meets the Yarra River.

An arresting urban fringe landscape. Lattice-like steel transmission towers carrying high tensile power lines. Gymea lilies, endemic to coastal areas near Sydney, reaching high into the sky, their spectacular red flowers largely spent. Thistles and prickly pear rampant. The naturally formed creek the stranger as it meanders through this environment of alien structures and plant life.

The Darebin Creek Trail leads us past a breeding ground of the growling grass frog, one of Australia’s largest frogs and vulnerable now due to habitat loss and degradation. They seek shelter under the protection of logs, rocks and long grass in winter, emerging in spring to breed, the males growling a long deep growl to attract females.

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Walking through basalt grasslands. The day ours. Black boulders and a small waterfall. The creek appearing and disappearing. The chortling of magpies. The rose pink and grey of galahs, white-faced herons, little pied cormorants. More wetlands and frogs, including the tiny Common Froglet that calls ‘criiick, criiik, criik’.

The trail takes us alongside and under the M80 ring road. There’s the occasional roar of a truck but otherwise, there’s little traffic on this normally congested freeway. Swallows nesting under its shadow. Jean-Michel Basquiat inspired graffiti painted on the concrete pylons that hold the road aloft. Ducks resting on rocks in the warm sunshine. 

Through parklands where the tree trunks are wound with wool the colours of a rainbow. A young girl feeding sheep handfuls of grass. An apple orchard. Remnants of a time before housing estates claimed the land. A fence decorated with wooden letters that spell out Love. Persimmons and pomegranates ready for harvesting in yards that back on to the creek.

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By mid-afternoon, with homeschooling done for the day, the crowd builds on the trail. Parents intent on tiring overly-energetic children, friends strolling two by two, commuter cyclists slowed by the traffic on the normally quiet bush track. 

Slender fan-tale cuckoos and crested pigeons that take to the air with a whistling flight as we pass. The day still warm and sunny. The light soft and autumnal. The landscape glowing.  

We follow the trail into the Darebin Parklands, once a wasteland and now a haven for wildlife, remnant indigenous vegetation, natural rock faces, wetlands, century-old olive trees and a spiritual healing trail. A journey through the realm of nature and possibility.  

The sun setting. An almost full, pale moon hanging low in the early evening sky. Our senses satiated. The world at peace. 

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The Southeastern Trail (26.2 km)

Cloudy skies and northerly winds. So, we walk southeasterly, through the silent streets of Clifton Hill decorated with the symbols of isolation. Rainbows chalked on pavements and painted on windows, half-hidden teddy bears waiting to be found by children out bear hunting. 

On through verdant green parklands until we reach the Yarra River. Past the Fairfield Boat House and across the iron bridge. A man stops us, keen to chat about walks he’s done in New Zealand and not minding the space he’s occupying on the narrow bridge. Pedestrians banking up, unprepared to risk passing too closely. Cyclists navigating the standoff.

The far-carrying bell-like call of a bird. The ‘silver-voiced’ bellbird, immortalised in poetry, whose notes can be heard ‘running and ringing’ through the forest. Unfortunately, their behaviour belies their sweet sound. They’re aggressive colonisers and by persistent harassment, they drive other small birds out of their territory. 

We take the bush track, closer to the river. Dirt under our feet. The scent of Eucalyptus. A random climate change slogan at the base of a tree; ‘the seas are rising and so are we’. At Chandler Bridge, we leave the river for the Outer Circle Line Trail, though not before exploring the recently created wetlands, the pedestrian bridge where once the rail line ran and the Chandler Highway underpass with its 60-metre-long mural depicting the story of how the Yarra River was formed, as told by Barak, a leader of the local Wurundjeri clan.   

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Past an old woodyard and into the leafy-green eastern suburbs. Streets graciously lined with plane trees on the turn. A stop in Deepdene for a coffee. Then down through a series of deep cuttings and into another realm. Constant reminders of the ill-fated Outer Circle Railway Line; stranded platforms, paint-peeling rail-crossing signs, stories of accidents and death. 

The line connected Fairfield to Oakleigh, via Kew and East Camberwell. It started closing just two years after it opened in 1891. Self-serving members of parliament voted for its construction after purchasing property nearby, which they then quickly sold for a large profit. On its opening, the Daily Telegraph noted that ‘As a goods line it is out of the question; as a passenger, it accommodates only the inmates of the Kew Asylum and they travel very little … It might do for a tourist line, but people are not yet educated up to prowling about on the outskirts of obscure suburbs.’ 

Autumnal treasure all about. Ruby, amber, gold. A child in a red tutu, a pale ballerina flitting amongst the she-oaks. Cloud building. The trail awash with teenage girls in sports uniforms, substituting walking for their Physical Education class in this time of learning from home. Dog walkers out with their designer pooches, a different breed to the rescue dogs of the inner north. A cyclist sings to us as he passes by ‘I love to go a-wandering, Along the mountain track’. 

Through the remnants of the Ashburton Forest and down to the Gardiners Creek Trail. Purple moorhens, black ducks and Eurasian coots foraging in the wetlands as we near Tooronga Station. 

On the train home, we reflect on another splendid day’s walking. The light soft and golden. The wind favouring us. The exploration a joy after weeks of confining ourselves to our immediate neighbourhood. 

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The Circular Trail (17.1 km)

Last night we watched the lush, beguiling Orlando. The film, based on a Virginia Woolf novel, is all Tilda Swinton’s. She is luminous as Orlando; transcending time, gender and mortality to break free from confinement. A film for the times. 

Normally at the end of a day’s Camino walking, we take in the town, find a bar for a celebratory drink and then, a restaurant for dinner. On our Isolation Camino, we stay in, as we must, and avail ourselves of the arts on offer to soothe the solitude of our lockdown evenings. Twelfth Night from the National Theatre, Romeo & Juliet from Shakespeare’s Globe, a virtual tour of Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul. Music from the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Kate Miller-Heidke. A super quiz from The Saturday Paper. An indigo night sky burning bright with stars.  

This morning we step out into wild gusting winds. Storm light. Swirls of rainbow lorikeets. Fallen autumn, leaves gathering in mounds on the footpath. A buddha in a saffron-painted niche. The Eureka Tower molten gold in the distance. A lustre to the morning.  

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Westwards through the streets of Fitzroy North, following the linear park trail to Princes Park where we turn southwards, cutting across the park’s green swaths to Melbourne Cemetery. Fallen angels, Celtic crosses, forgotten orthodox icons. A view beyond the Albanian Mosque, Melbourne’s first (opened in 1969), to the blue haze of the Dandenongs. 

A shuttered Melbourne University. A pause for lunch at Victoria Market before turning east through the city, deserted except for a scattering of masked shoppers, to the Treasury Gardens. Velvet green lawns. Tree-lined paths winding through tranquillity. Cedars, Moreton Bay figs, English elms, Dutch elms. The elms among the most significant stands in the world since the apocalypse wrought by Dutch elm disease in the Northern hemisphere. Across the road to the Fitzroy Gardens, burnished with autumn’s splendour. A scarred tree, the Fairies’ Tree, the Temple of the Winds with its ten Corinthian columns. 

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On through the genteel streets of East Melbourne with their stately Victorian terraces, bluestone mansions and art deco apartment buildings. Blue enamel plaques marking the houses of the notable, including the house where the painter Eugene von Gerard lived. A detour down a laneway to look at the Grand Designs featured 4-storey, mini-skyscraper house built on the site of a 5×4 metre garage.  

Northwards, through the gritty, art-strewn streets of Collingwood, the more sedate ones of Clifton Hill, then down a cobblestone lane to home, where we started. Our Isolation Camino complete. 

Our walking rhythm regained, we feel as if we could walk forever. In our imagining, the near and far world opens up to us, our five-day journey setting off a chain reaction of adventurous possibilities. We have broken free of confinement. Our spirits soar.

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For more stories of walking in the time of a pandemic, go to Walking in the Winter of Our Discontent and Walking into the Light in the last stage of COVID-19 lockdown.