Walking into the Light

Melbourne is in lockdown. We can only walk for an hour a day, within a five-kilometre radius of home. Once out in the world, we cannot come close to another person or stop to enjoy a coffee or a glass of wine. And we must wear a mask. The seductive aromas of coffee roasters and spice shops, the fragrance of starry clematis, sweet floral wattle and heady jasmine are lost to us. 

Touch, taste and smell, all compromised by what it takes to keep COVID-19 at bay. Light, however, is not denied to us. The blue hour, the golden hour, solar noon, the twilights. If we walk at different times of the day, perhaps we will see things in a different light and deepen our sensory experience of these strange times. 

We decide to utilise our permitted one hour a day of exercise to explore our neighbourhood, starting by walking into the first light of dawn and finishing seven days later in the last light of dusk.

Walk 1, Astronomical & Nautical Dawn 

In the dark, just after the end of curfew at 5 am, we set out from home. An unusually warm, late winter’s morning. The neon lights of the city reflected in the low-slung clouds. 

The first train, the first birdsong. Astronomical dawn, the sun still 18 degrees below the horizon. The sky overcast, obscuring the celestial brightness of Venus. 

Across the barely discernible creek, up a deserted High Street, past one of Melbourne’s shabbiest shopping centres loved by members of the Northcote Plaza Appreciation Society for its daggy blandness and Frank, its resident pigeon. 

No other walkers, just a lone cyclist and an occasional car. Through the dark, back streets to All Nations Park. Nautical dawn, the sun now 12 degrees below the horizon. From the summit of the hill in the centre of the park, we imagine the indigo blue vastness as a sea, bereft of sailors. 

Stumbling about for a way down from the rock-walled mound, we come across Gold Head, a life-sized head on a plinth that appeared mysteriously one summer’s night earlier in the year. The Council removed it after it was found knocked to the ground, but after a public campaign the now-mythical Gold Head made a triumphant return and it stands looking out over the city. In the blue hue of dawn, it glows as a symbol of resilience and survival.

Birdsong building to a crescendo as we leave the park. A grand magnolia tree, caught in the ethereal dawn light. Northcote Cemetery, tucked between sleeping houses, is padlocked at this hour. The sky begins to lighten as we make our way home, night transitioning into day.

Walk 2, The Blue Hour I

A blue-hour walk today, through civil dawn into sunrise. The sun below the horizon, the world suffused with bluish light. The high pitched buzz of lorikeets in the still-black trees. A glow low in the sky to the east. 

Civil dawn, the brightest form of morning twilight. It is light enough for us to navigate the dirt paths that wind through the bush by the river. There are more people out and about than yesterday. A handful of other walkers, cyclists and early morning runners. Through the Darling Gardens where bats are still foraging, down the quiet streets of Clifton Hill and across the pedestrian bridge high above the Eastern Freeway. There’s some traffic on the move, but it’s far from its normal morning peak. 

Along Trenerry Crescent, once home to red-brick spinning mills, boot factories and hat manufacturers. Lights coming on in apartment buildings, cafes opening and a radio blaring from a timber supply warehouse. Dog owners chatting to other dog owners while their pets run free and loose on the shorn green grass of Victoria Park. A brushtail possum clamours up a tree as we pass close by.

Out onto Studley Park Road with views across to the gothic buildings of Abbotsford Convent before we turn towards the Yarra River and slip into wildness. A cascade of cream, starry clematis flowers, baubles of bright yellow wattle and pale-trunked eucalyptus. Cutting across a headland we walk through native grasslands to the edge of the high sandstone escarpment that looks out over Deep Rock.

Nearby is a memorial cairn built of river shale to commemorate Charles Grimes and his exploration party, ‘the first white men to discover the River Yarra’ in 1803. No such memorial exists to remind us that we are in an Aboriginal cultural landscape, the traditional country of the Wurundjeri People. Last night, as part of the ‘at home’ Melbourne International Film Festival, we watched Looky Looky Here Comes Cooky. It’s a First Nations film about the arrival of Captain Cook that offers a broader perspective on our country’s complex history.  

A cyclist flashes past; after the sharp climb, a fast-flowing descent. A streak of gold in a sky of bruised clouds. The sun, rising over woodlands and the Italianate Willsmere, a residential estate that was originally an elegantly designed, if nightmarish, asylum.

Along Johnson Street, past a cafe that is usually a frenzy of caffeine addicts on their way to work at this hour, through gentrifying Collingwood to Fitzroy North, never more so our home than now when we are bound to it.

Walk 3, Mid-morning 

Out into a sunlit mid-morning. The light soft and golden after last night’s rain. The sky scrimmed with blue. Shadows smudged like charcoal.

Walking the minor streets and laneways of the inner north. Past Fitzroy High School, silent without its high-spirited students. Blossoming fruit and nut trees. Flowering jasmine tumbling over back fences. Queens Parade village, devoid of people. In some shops, the only thing on display is a fluoro For Lease sign.

Exotic birds in a tree. Or so we believe, until they fly to the ground and we see they’re red-rumped parrots. Bright green, blue-green, red and yellow feathered; foraging for seeds among the short grass and long shadows of the Darling Gardens.  

Home-schooled children drawing their maths in chalk on the pavement. 20-storey rockets. Hopscotch with rectangles numbered according to the x3 multiplication table. Despite the anonymity of her mask, we recognise a former colleague and stop to chat. She’s out walking her dog, having a fresh air break from her working-from-home day. We hear of one teenage son thriving in the brave new world of screen-based learning and one struggling with the lack of social interaction. 

The beautiful, clear, soft light persists. Every building a complex play of sun rays and shadows. We wander through the open-air art gallery that is Collingwood. Amidst a morass of tags, there’s some striking street art. The vibrant, large-scale portraits of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, honouring the artists and Haring’s iconic Collingwood mural. Paintings of mythical creatures, larger than life faces and a velvet-suited rabbit urging on his rooster-drawn cart. Callum Preston’s huge, white and blue block letters making a plea for Serenity Now. A flow of leaves and feathers, detailing the intricate beauty of the natural world and the terrible destruction of last summer’s fires.

We stop for take-aways at our favourite, old-school Italian cafe in Smith Street. They say business is slower than it was during the first lockdown. The deserted street bears witness to this.

Walk 4, Solar Noon 

Noon comes from the Latin, nona hora, the 9th hour after daybreak. It was used to denote the timing of daily prayer and a meal at 3:00 pm. In the 12th century, the time of the prayer and meal shifted to midday but the term remained the same. 

Solar noon, the moment when the sun crosses the meridian and reaches its highest point in the sky, doesn’t normally occur precisely at midday. Today solar noon (or high noon) is at 12:23 pm. It’s raining when we set out but it’s still the brightest time of this, the dullest day of the week. 

A white jet plane in the sky, floating in and out of white clouds. A sight to stop and behold, now it’s so rare. A rainbow painted on the path into the school. Water pooling on the bitumen reflecting a colour-splashed world. 

Ghost signs of once-prosperous enterprises fading on brick walls. We can’t help but wonder what shadowland this pandemic will leave in its wake and what those that come after us will know by its symbols. 

Around high noon we arrive at what some might regard as the dead heart of our walk, the Melbourne General Cemetery. As much a public park as a necropolis, it’s a place of solace and reflection in these times of uncertainty, a place that gives reassurance to life as a continuum, played out over the centuries. There are memorials to the famous and infamous but the one we notice today is in honour of an Italian born migrant whose epitaph reads It was a hoot!

We walk on in the rain under a still-bright sky, through the quiet streets of North Carlton and the Edinburgh Gardens where the sculpture of a worm, The Unsung Hero, glows resplendently golden on its grey plinth.

Walk 5, Mid-afternoon 

Mid-afternoon, clouds streaking across the blue sky. The sun a bright, white aureole shining through a corona of pastel-coloured rings. Shadows appear and disappear. Between us and the source of light, all is silhouetted. 

A walk with the three children in our care becomes an adventure. The playgrounds are closed but the children seize upon the rocks dotted about the landscape to create an imagined world. No sooner do they settle to watch a fantastical program on television watching rock than they run to kitchen rock for food or bed rock for a rest. Every so often they return to home rock, deemed to be the safest rock of all. When a stranger settles quietly on a rock they frighten her away, claiming it as their domain. 

The wind starts gusting and their game playing moves to the groves of trees edging the park. They search for the most secretive of shelters to escape the mythical, mouthless monsters that we have become in the story they weave. Even though we walk almost no distance in our allotted hour, to the children’s way of seeing the world, we’ve been on a journey to an enchanted, faraway universe.

We make our way home, past greening trees and a eucalypt strung with a wish for my family to be safe. Rays of light illuminate the stone labyrinth and those that walk it.

Walk 6, The Golden Hour 

Late each Friday afternoon during lockdown, our townhouse neighbours sit on their 2nd-storey balconies and converse across space, wine in hand, rugs at the ready for when the temperature plummets. Verandah-ing has become a phenomenon. Households gather on their front verandahs to take in the last warmth of the day and watch the world go by, a reprieve from the seclusion and solitude of their day spent working at home. 

For an hour or so before sunset, with the sun low in the sky and the shadows long, the light is diffused and all shades of soft red and yellow. The golden hour. We walk across the railway bridge, its steel girders glowing like precious metal, north along the Merri Creek and then westwards, into the back blocks of Brunswick in search of golden moments. 

An elusive rainbow. A dark stormy sky. The gold in the light, subtle at first then luminous. After a rainstorm that ends as suddenly as it began, gold floods back into the sky. Buildings pulsate with a dazzling golden light. The horizon glows. The gold statue on top of Our Lady Help of Christians church lights up like a beacon. The world is radiant. 

We turn for home. The light of the setting sun is shot through with rainbow streaks as lorikeets hone in on the darkening trees. The streetscape is as if viewed through a kaleidoscope, an ever-changing jewel-like swirl of patterns and colours. 

Walk 7, The Blue Hour II

A fire flares low in the sky to the west as the sun drops below the horizon and the last of the gold drains from the light. We’ve been inside all day, held by a deluge of rain, but now we’re out and even though it’s bitterly cold, it’s exhilarating to be making our way towards the Carlton Gardens for the calm and mystery of dusk.

We pass a pair of tawny frogmouths on a low branch of a tree in the Edinburgh Gardens as we walk beyond the setting sun and into the blue hour. 

The moon, a crescent of silver. The sky pale blue at first, then tinged with pink before civic twilight gives way to nautical twilight and the blue intensifies to indigo.  

People out strolling, taking in as much of the gardens as they can before curfew descends. A chattering of ducks and moorhens settling by the pond, the distinctive qu-arck of a Nankeen night heron emerging into the twilight. 

The great, angular blades of the Melbourne Museum soar into the blueness. An illuminated strip of milky green light marks the little-known underground passageway between the post-modernist museum and the neo-classical Royal Exhibition Building. This elegant grand hall served as a makeshift hospital and morgue during the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1919, a tragic postscript to WWI. As the disease spread, Victorians were encouraged to wear masks, public gatherings were prohibited and long-distance travel was restricted. A hundred years later, we can be extraordinarily grateful that we’ve been spared the preceding war. 

A couple of skateboarders cruise the sweeping, blue-lit museum plaza. We wander off into the gathering darkness, astronomical twilight just a breath away.

Afterword

A liturgy of seven hour-long walks, exploring the world together. Paying attention to the granular and noticing how different things look at different times of the day. The light of sunrise, sunset, solar noon, the golden hour, the blue hour. Revelling in the beauty of it and dreaming of a time when we can walk all day, from first light to last.

You might also enjoy our story of walking the City of Yarra’s borders: Walking in the Winter of Our Discontent or our Our Isolation Camino.