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As I led Harcha down the paddock, the hill spoke to me too. It reminded me of the time I came galloping across here on Harcha’s back at full speed.

I hadn’t ridden for a very long time before that, but my mother was visiting us and I was showing off.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said my concerned wife, Suzanne, when she saw me getting up on Harcha.

“Oh don’t be silly,” countered my mother. “Leonard’s an excellent rider. Why, when he was young he used to gallop everywhere on his pony, Turfy.” (His name was actually Surfy). “He used to work at the racing stables, Sue, riding all the racehorses.”

Images of that day in the back paddock are embedded in my memory. I rode down the hill at an uneasy chanter. The cellular nation of Harcha was accustomed to the gentle, schooled riding of my daughters at show jumping and dressage. She just couldn’t relate to the technique of this overweight, oafish wannabe cowboy tugging on her reins and kicking her in the ribs. Frankly she didn’t like it.

When we arrived at the bottom of the hill, out of sight of my concerned family, she had a go at bucking me off. I gave her a firm smack to remind her who was in charge here. Then I headed her home. This task she embraced with gusto. She reverted to her youth on the race tracks and bolted up the hill like the true thoroughbred that she was. “Ah yes,” reported foreign minister Leonard to my Ruling Council. “This will show my daughters what their dressage pony is really capable of. As we came up the hill at top speed I must look like Roy Rogers in full flight.”

But my Ruling Council didn’t share my enthusiasm. It was receiving alarming reports from its delegates in my legs that suggested the whole nation did not have an adequate grip on the galloping animal. Moreover, ocular delegates were reporting a dearth of space between the speeding duo and the end of the paddock. The Ruling Council considered all the submissions and decided the best course of action for the longer-term future of the nation was to direct the foreign minister to abandon the Roy Rogers pose and try to find a way to form a strong alliance with the nation of Harcha. Unfortunately events moved quickly. By the time this advice arrived it was already obsolete. I had to report back to the Ruling Council with disturbing developments. The nation of Harcha had slammed on her brakes while at the same time putting her head down and bucking her rump into the air. This effectively severed all ties with the nation of Leonard. So in actual fact the nation of Leonard was at this point nonaligned. Technically speaking we were now in a low orbit around the third planet from the Sun and were anticipating a touchdown on the surface in the not too distant future. My Ruling Council issued an urgent warning to all departments to prepare for a crash. I hit the hard ground with a thud like a sack of potatoes. I lay on my back winded and motionless. I knew that my family would be concerned, yet I couldn’t move to reassure them until the Ruling Council gave the all-clear after running its checks. I can wiggle my toes, so that’s a good sign, I can move my legs, my hands, my arms. Nothing seems to have broken – what relief. I didn’t even feel the excruciating pain I would feel later on, because the Ruling Council had administered pain killers to all parts of my body as a precaution.

I stood up and smiled to show my worried family that I was OK. “Aren’t you supposed to get back on the horse?” suggested Suzanne sarcastically.

“No, no, that’s not a good idea,” said my startled mother. “Come to think of it, I think it was Peter (my brother) who used to work with race horses,” she added, almost under her breath.

As I pass near that touchdown point, Harcha is struggling to get her legs to cooperate with each other in order to stay ahead of Leigh, following behind. The level patch at the top of the paddock reminds me of all the dressage lessons the girls had there.

Suzanne and I would watch from the lounge as Rosalie, the instructor, would bark directions at them in her thick Dutch accent.

An old, broken piece of painted PVC pipe lying in the long grass reminds me of the jumps we built for the girls, using the plastic pipes for poles. It says “remember how proud they were when they first managed to jump the horses over me”.

Everything revolves around communication – language, seeing, talking and listening.

There is a condition called Synesthesia where our senses get confused. This results in a person quite literally tasting a shape or seeing a colour in a sound. Or as neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran describes it Purple Numbers and Sharp Cheese.

The fact is this is really just an intense version of what we all do all the time. We can hear with our eyes, we can see with our nose. Certain smells evoke memories, pictures of places in our past. For me the smell of certain infant lotions immediately transport me back to the changing tables and bath tubs when my children were infants. The smell of certain paints send me back to the ocean liner, the Castle Felice, when I was a toddler migrating to Australia. I am standing on the deck looking out at the ocean. The smell is the blue paint on the ship’s guard rails. I experienced this vividly while playing football in my youth. I never enjoyed football. My team would have to be in the running for a record as the biggest losers of all time. We kicked one goal and one point – not for the match, for the season. I caught a whiff of the new paint on the steel tray used to carry the drinks and it transported me back to the Castle Felice out on the open ocean.

Now if I smell the paint I go to both places simultaneously, the football and the Castle Felice. The paint talks to me and I can’t not listen.

Everything is talking. This is the whole basis of the art world. Artworks speak from the gallery walls, sometimes they whisper, sometimes they scream. But they always have something to say, even bad art. Everyday items tell stories. Warhol knew it – a Campbells Soup Can, Brillo Pads. We have all seen these items time and time again, but by painting them Warhol was saying: “Look again, and listen – they have got something to say.”

There is a little suburban park in Mincha St, Frankston. This is where I first kissed Suzanne. I recently revisited the park after being away for more than 20 years. Everything was talking at me, the trees, the swings, the birds, the grass, the fence, -- all reminding me of minute details of that wonderful afternoon. Many of these details I had long forgotten, but by going back to the park – to this sacred site – they all came back.

But here’s the wired thing – it was a two-way conversation. While the park and all its inhabitants reminded me of my life-changing moment in Mincha St, it also seemed to want to know what has happened to us since. Just being there made me think of all the momentous events in our lives, our children, our careers, our screaming arguments, our love-making – everything.

This experience gave me an insight into the Aboriginals’ concept of sacred sites, of songlines across the land – the poetry of place.

As Harcha and I passed the halfway point on our way down the hill, Theo moved the tractor away from the grave to a respectful distance. The land was telling the truth when it spoke to him on his arrival, down the back near the dam was indeed a good place to dig – no rocks.

Chapter 11

Listening to The Land

Our modern way of life, the industrial revolution, are totally dependent on the land telling us where to dig. Geologists have learned to read the language of the land from plate tectonics down to grains of sand.

To you and I a rock is a rock. But to a geologist it’s a book – a history book, an autobiographical history book. It tells the story of how it came into being, by fire or by water. In the case of the latter, for example, its structure indicates if it was laid by a river, the ocean or a lake and where in the lake. The microscopic fossilized remains of plants, pollens and organisms tell about the environment at the time it was formed. The patterns in the way the grains are structured tell about where and how the sediments were formed. For example where in the river the rock came from and what kind of river it was.

Uluru (formerly Ayres Rock) is one of the most famous and most photographed rocks in the world. To most of us it’s a magnificent mountain rising out of the dessert. However, a geologist friend of mine, John McPherson, explained that it was an ancient river bed. The sediments that make up the rock were laid down hundreds of millions of years ago by a rapidly flowing river criss-crossing the landscape in a high-energy braided delta.

Millions of years of being buried under high pressure cemented the sediments into rock. Then as the Australian tectonic plate crashed into other continents the sediments buckled up, forming a huge mountain range. A few hundred million years of exposure to the elements eroded all the mountains away except for one – Uluru. It has quite a few millions years to go before it too will be gone.

When John visits Uluru it tells him the story of the land. But it’s not just a history lesson. While this remnant of tectonic collisions past continues to erode away, the Australia-India Plate is colliding with Asia forming new mountains – the Himalayas and the highlands of south Asia and Papua New Guinea. These mountains are being pushed up at about the same speed that our fingernails grow, which is also about the rate at which they are eroding. The Himalayas are young, high-energy formations dancing in their prime. Uluru is an old man, the last remnant of ancient alps, who long ago left the dance floor.

Kerry Sieh, a paleoseimologist at Caltech’s Tectonics Observatory, has learned the language of the land where the earth’s tectonic plates crash. Around the turn of the millennium, while working with a team of colleagues in Sumatra where the India-Australia plate is crashing below Asia, the Mentawai Islands told him a secret.

They said they were stressed and they would soon be releasing their stress the way they always do.

Sieh and his colleagues knew exactly what this meant – a megathrust earthquake.

Megathrust earthquakes occur at the subduction zones where one tectonic plate is crashing underneath another. The energy they release is many times more powerful than a conventional fault-slip earthquake.

Mercifully megathrust earthquakes occur very rarely in human years. However, in earth years they happen all the time. Thanks to the work of people like Professor Sieh, science has learned to read the literature laid down by the landscape at the subduction zones.

Sieh’s understanding of the language of the Sumatran subduction zone is so precise that he can practically set his watch by its megathrust quake events – that is his earth-years watch which has a “seconds” hand that ticks in decades.

When he tried to spread the warning from the Mentawai Islands he came up against a language barrier. Geoscientists understood what he was saying, because they could relate to the language of the earth.

In fact three month’s before Boxing Day 2004, Geoscience Australia published an article titled The Rates of Wrath. Nature’s Effect on the Built Environment in which it discussed the eminent threat from the Sumatran fault and pointed out: “There is an international tsunami warning system for the Pacific Ocean, but none for the Indian Ocean.”

In 2004 Sieh and his colleagues, working with limited resources, began a program of public education in the Mentawai Islands off the Sumatran coast. They used posters including simple graphics to translate the geological language into local languages as they spoke to community groups. This simple, yet vital, information saved many lives in the local area, but tragically never reached the wider audience in the nations surrounding the Indian Ocean.

While the response to the pre-2004 tsunami warnings was lacking, the international response to the event itself was overwhelming. The world was united in its response, raising an unprecedented $18 billion in aid funds.

However, today Sieh and his colleagues must be feeling an ominous sense of déjà vu. Their research has indicated that these megathrust quakes off Sumatra occur in clusters. “On the basis of our findings we expect that one or two more great earthquakes and tsunamis, nearly as devastating as the 2004 event, are to be expected within the next few decades in a region of coastal Sumatra to the south of the zone affected in 2004,” said Sieh in a paper published by the Royal Society, London, in October 2005.

This prediction was repeated in an article in Science magazine and again in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As with the pre-2004 predictions, the international response has been underwhelming.

Once again Sieh and his colleagues have been active in educating local communities. Along the Sumatran coast there are more than a million people in the tsunami firing line.

But in a world where the media’s attention span is measured in minutes, it’s hard to generated any real enthusiasm for events that happen in geological time.

Chapter 12

Just Passing Through

I brought Harcha to a stop about two metres from the deep hole and held her steady with the chain. The dog chain – which I had to use since Astro the Labrador had long since chewed the horse leads into fluff – added an inappropriate penal flavor to the somber proceedings.

Leonard McDonnell

The Edge Media Pty Ltd