The Old Lady and Her Bike

It’s hard to believe but a new syndrome that I hadn’t even heard of has dropped: Invisible Woman Syndrome (IWS). As a vertically challenged, stocky, old lady with short grey hair (bit of a mannish cut honestly), obviously I will be completely traumatised by IWS. Because this is necessarily true, I was surprised that riding the Mogo trails yesterday (Kings Birthday weekend) not only could other riders see me but they were close to effusive in their praise.

It was both a lovely day out and busy on the trails. The busiest weekend I’ve seen, which was honestly a bit of a surprise given it is June and cool down on the south coast. The trails were riding extremely well, a bit dusty in places, but dry and wide open. Vehicles everywhere because hardly anyone rides uphill anymore even young blokes with electric bikes. Southbound Escapes was running regular shuttles, and, there were even a few people riding uphill, and some were on an analog bikes!

As usual, the women were outnumbered about four to one by men, but there were some women, lots of families, and, notably, very few vertically challenged, stocky, old ladies with short grey hair on a bog standard analog bike with no fancy padding or equipment and a K Mart bicycle helmet. As I was expecting to suffer IWS, I was quite surprised to finish up my ride having got accolades and encouragement from at least a dozen riders.

All joking aside, it was kind of weird because riders kept saying things like “you made it,” “you’re awesome,” “keep going, you can do it.” At no time did I feel like I couldn’t do what I was doing although I admit I was breathing like a dragon on crack cocaine, and there may have been occasional expletives directed at my quads (it was the day after leg day).

Taming The Mob

Growing up one of my cousins had autism. S was a nice kid, but pretty much non-verbal, had great difficulty with social interaction, and engaged in repetitive behaviours that are typical of autistic people. S loved any kind of machine that made a noise and/or vibrated, and was delighted if he found a machine that did both. At the time, my Mum had a big bulky vacuum cleaner typical of the 1960’s and S would turn the vacuum on and stand on it for hours and hours uninterrupted. Before my Mum lost her memory to age, she would fondly remember S and his penchant for her vacuum cleaner with great affection. My Dad too, when he was alive, also remembered S with deep and abiding love. When S came to visit, Mum would get the vacuum out and Dad would go through his entire tool shed trying to find another machine that would make noise and vibrate. Dad never stopped trying to interact with S but never in a way that was forceful or difficult for S. At the time, we were all a bit bamboozled by S but we all knew that he was one of those precious people that we keep close and treat with extra tenderness.

But S and his family had a tough life. S was never able to live alone, get a job, meet a partner, get married, have children; he required constant care and missed out on all the things that we neurotypicals (and in fact most people who now call themselves neurodivergent) enjoy in life, both simple things, like sunrise in the morning, and complex activities, like graduating from university. Of course, the entire family was affected because there were three children and S required such a high level of care from his parents that the two normal children, by necessity, received less attention. When his parents (my aunt and uncle) were too old to be the primary caregivers for S, his siblings had to step up. S was never, in his entire life, able to live independently.

If you have some first hand experience with true autism, it is impossible not to greet the almost innumerable people (frequently young women) who claim a diagnosis of autism or neurodivergence and yet who live fulfilling and by all outward appearances completely normal and often privileged lives without some kind of scepticism. At least I do. Both because I am a sceptic and because I recognise in myself so many traits that neurodivergent people claim represent them. To prove the point, I took this online test and discovered that my “score is typical for many people with autism spectrum disorder.”

But, I don’t think I have autism or neurodivergence or ASD or any other psycho-social diagnoses. I think I’m a bit different to other people but, with modifications to my behaviour and some degree of social (and intellectual) intelligence, I can function in society even if I never feel like I really fit in. I don’t need a label and, in fact, a label would inhibit me from learning to deal with things in appropriate and responsible ways. We grow from difficulties not from having society or family or friends or even paid caregivers cater to our every whim. Fitting in (masking as the neurodivergent call it) is part of life as an adult. If you want adult privileges you must meet adult responsibilities.

In a controversial move – at least in highly politicised circles – the ABC (at great cost because everything the ABC does seems very costly) is producing a series of podcasts called “Autistic AF with Grace Tame.” These four episodes of the “Ladies We Need to Talk Podcast” seek to connect “with other neurodivergent women to get a better understanding of what life is like as an autistic person, beyond the stereotypes.” Now I’m not going to listen to these podcasts. That’s above and beyond what I will do for a simple and rarely read blog. In all honesty, I would rather eat cane toads for a week than listen to a podcast that is entitled “Ladies We Need to Talk” because I don’t fit in with 99% of women. I am much more comfortable around men not only because I do not understand female ways of connecting but also because some of these women are – at least in my opinion - insufferable.

Tame, who was the darling of both the left and the centre, became a target for criticism after a highly emotional speech at a Palestinian rally where she gave the mobilising cry “From Gadigal to Gaza globalise the Intifada,” which was followed up with an interview on ABC radio where she made the statement that sexual assault of women by Hamas on October 7^th had been “debunked” and was “propaganda.” As an aside, if you haven’t seen Tame’s Globalise the Intifada speech it is worth watching because Tame is really, really good at delivering speeches. Whether you agree with the slogan or the rally or are just an average human and plain horrified by the Israel-Palestine conflict you have to recognise that Tame is a consummate speaker. She is so good at giving speeches that you might be mistaken for thinking that she is actually really good at connecting with people (not a common trait among autistic people).

In an interview with Rebel News, outside of the ABC studios where a motley gang of folk were protesting the four episodes of the podcast featuring Tame (not something that I could be arsed doing but something I support in a democratic society), Charlie Pickering spoke a few sentences, barely a paragraph that, in my neurotypical or is it neurodiverse way of thinking was pretty banal all things considered. These are his exact words: “I do actually think it’s problematic, that’s my personal opinion. As you would understand, and as a Jewish Australian, there’s a complete misunderstanding of a lot of the words that are said and what [the] true meanings of them are. A lot of people are using words and phrases that have meaning well beyond what they think they do. I think you could argue that a lot of people who jump on protest bandwagons are ignorant a lot of the time.”

I might be wrong, because I may not be completely normal, but I don’t think the average Australian is offended by this. Certainly, the average Australian should NOT be offended by it because Pickering preferences all he says with the words “that’s my personal opinion.” A personal opinion was something we were all entitled to until we invented micro-aggressions and lateral trauma, and suddenly discovered we were all victims. A society of victims, what could possibly go wrong? But, of course, the left has lost it’s mind and has engaged, as it so often does, in a full scale social media lynching. Left wing media outlets were aghast when the NSW government floated a proposal to ban the words “Globalise the Intifada,” and yet, the same people who insist on protections for free speech have roundly condemned Charlie Pickering and would happily see him taken off the air. Free speech is never free I guess.

I haven’t watched or listened to Charlie Pickering since the Covid years when it became obvious, at least to me, that a segment of society was becoming increasingly authoritarian and coercive. I might be forced to live under regulations which I considered antithetical to basic human rights (Covid was never like Ebola, an infection that needed draconian social policy to manage) but I didn’t have to make things worse by being listening to Orwellian level propaganda. But I would, if pushed, be inclined to agree with Pickering. 

We have immature 20 and 30 something neurodiverse people speaking with complete confidence and authority about issues which are complex, historically and culturally deeply rooted, and, are, at their most basic level, so far outside their area of expertise, personal knowledge or even thoughtful reflection, that it would be akin to me giving a lecture on string theory to Stephen Hawking. I would look a fool, as do the young women (and men) who confidently proclaim authority on world affairs. Hubris is the burden of youth which unfortunately gets inflicted on an entire society when the protagonists are elevated beyond their level of intelligence because they meet an idealised version of the oppressed (who frequently turns around and becomes the oppressor).

But back to podcasts about autism. I can’t really comment because, as I said previously, I’m not going to actually listen to the podcast, but I certainly feel that the true experience of autism is unlikely to be communicated in the “Ladies We Need to Talk” podcast, because, the true experience of severe autism is not something that is easy to confront. The type of autism my cousin had is deeply distressing, exhausting to manage, and requires unrequited commitment in the face of zero positive feedback. It is not conducive to quirky social media posts or $20K per engagement speaking fees. It is the life long sorrow of something that could have been but was not. Human potential never truly realised, the greatest loss we all are forced to witness.

For an interesting analysis of the explosion of autism and ADHD diagnoses read Dr Suzanne O'Sullivan's book The Age of Diagnosis.

Big swell, Little Wind, Strong Wind, Little Swell

Finally the winter westerlies are here. Today we had a strong wind warning but a relatively low swell (HS about 0.70 metres, and Hmax around 1.4 metres). We noodled along the coast, in and out of all the bays, through the gauntlets, are far south as Mosquito Bay. The wind was up early, northwesterly not pure westerly, and pushing us along as we paddled south around headlands. Coming back, the wind was in our faces and it was nice to be out again paddling into the wind. I haven’t done that since the Furneaux Group circumnavigation.

The week before, we had a big swell (HS of 2 metres and Hmax of 4 metres) but no wind. We went north, out to North Head and as far north as Richmond Beach. The sea surface was almost glassy as there was no wind but the surface conditions were lumpy, bumpy with a secondary swell on top of the big ground swell. It was almost possible to catch runners back to our home bay but the swell was moving too fast to get onto.

Bonnum Pic

It’s a short drive between Bonnum Pic and Mount Jellore, both in Nattai National Park, so why would you not do both bush-walks while you are in the area? Accessed via a public road through private property (leave the gates as you find them) we parked just before the fire trail goes downhill into the Wollondilly Valley and becomes Wanganderry Pass Trail.

A short distance down the fire trail, an old burnt NPWS (National Parks and Wildlife Service) sign marks the start of the trail. There’s scant sign of maintenance here (scant in this case really equals none) but the foot pad is clear enough and a few of the old signs (many burnt in 2020) are still viable so you can follow the track relatively easily up and down two gullies. On the way out, we lost the track coming out of the second gully but if you head roughly straight uphill after crossing the little creek, you will come out into a big fire break beside private property.

The next few kilometres is pretty simple. Walk along the fire break until you it ends and a piece of old blue rope wrapped about a tree marks a very old road that heads roughly north along the plateau. The track is clear enough until you approach the cliff line (Wanganderry Walls) although the regrowth on either side is so thick you could be walking anywhere. There is one short section of heath where the regrowth is open, but most of the way you walk in a tunnel of acacia.

After about five kilometres the trail approaches the north south running cliff line and travels over some nice open sandstone slabs and pagodas. There are views down into the Wollondilly valley. It’s still worth keeping track of the foot pad as between the sandstone slabs the scrub is thick and the further north you go, towards the Pic of Bonnum Pic, the thicker the scrub becomes and the vaguer the foot-pad.

The last one to two kilometres is slow. It is really easy to lose the foot-pad as there seem to be decoy cairns in places and the ridge gains and loses 10 to 30 metres of elevation through thickening scrub. It’s worth searching out the foot pad each time you come down off a sandstone slab to avoid unnecessary bushwhacking. The foot pad, however, is for the most part, a tunnel here, and only visible when you are right up against it.

We ran out of both time and patience with the scrub about 300 metres from the very end, but we hadn’t brought a short rope in any event to do the “slide of death.” The view, unfortunately, is getting obscured as the scrub grows up but there are still spots where you get good views.

Our return was perhaps a bit quicker than the way out although we spent as much time searching for the foot pad on the way back as we did on the way out. I had mistakenly thought that we would recognise the various spots where we had dropped off the slabs into the bush but it turns out that thick brush scrub looks the same in both directions.

Mount Jellore

This newly upgraded walking track runs through Jellore Flora Reserve to top of Mount Jellore (834 metres) in Nattai National Park. I’m not sure when the track was upgraded, but at some point in the not too distant past it was a rough foot pad complete with a rope aided descent down and up the deep gully of a tributary of Jellore Creek. The NSW NPWS (National Parks and Wildlife Service) Jellore Flora Reserve website has a tremendous amount of information about cultural connection and zero information about the walking track which is very strange as I suspect a lot of money was spent upgrading the trail which now includes a large parking lot, steps into and out of the gully and copious signage.

In any event, it is a pleasant half day walk to and from Mount Jellore (3 to 3.5 hours will see you there and back comfortably) which has filtered views over Nattai National Park. On AllTrails, walkers report seeing Sydney in the distance on clear days (a straight line distance of 100 kilometres) but the bush is rapidly growing high after the 2020 fires and the view from some rocks just north of the trig (there are no views at the trig) are rapidly becoming obscured so visions of the high rises of Sydney are likely to be simply mirages.

The new trail is off Soapy Flat Road, a quiet rural road that takes you past the big houses and even bigger estates of Sydney’s wealthy elite. This makes the juxtaposition between all the cultural verbiage on the NSW NPWS website and the sprawling mansions set amidst manicured estates all the more jarring. Certainly no-one who is professing to being on stolen land here is giving anything back.

There are lots of large and tasteful sandstone blocks acting as bollards all along Soapy Flat Road and, as you walk through the bush on the track towards Mount Jellore past vast mounds of broken glass in old fire pits and rough driven in vehicle tracks, the purpose of these bollards becomes immediately obvious. Gentrification, in this instance, has benefited the natural environment.

The track runs along a broad ridge then descends down cleverly constructed steps to a creek and ascends on the other side. Leeches dwell in the creek, we picked up a few but managed to get the buggars off before they bit in. On the north side of the creek, the track intersects an old fire trail with private property to the west and continues east until it fades out at the base of the final short climb on a good zig-zagging track to Mount Jellore. The trig on top is apparently the first ever established in NSW in 1828 so there is a bit of history to go with your culcha.

Everything Old is New Again

This is the kind of trip report which you don’t really want to write because it makes you look like a complete dumb-arse. But we are all dumb-arses sometimes so here goes. On Sunday, after a couple of days of bush-walking, Doug and I drove over to an undisclosed State Forest to climb at a small crag. I’d marked the location (or what I thought was the location) on the topographic map. My pattern recognition primed brain saw a fire trail heading south from another fire trail and ending at a white area on the map (indicating no vegetation) with the hatched pattern that NSW topographic maps use to indicate a cliff line. This looked just like the little sketch map on the Crag Guide that I did not bother matching up latitude and longitude.

When we got to the State Forest however, we discovered that all the fire trails were closed except for one which runs north to south through the pine plantation. I had looked online before we left because, if you know anything about Australia, you will know that at any single point in time hundreds of hectares of public land are closed for one reason or another. There is nothing our bureaucracy likes more than closing public land because a twig has fallen or it might be a bit windy. Never waste an excuse to use an abundance of caution is the Australian motto.

It turns out, I discovered later, that the fire trails in this State Forest have been closed since 2022 because of damage to the roads due to wet weather. If you can do basic mathematics, that’s four years. I don’t actually mind closing fire trails to motorised transport. There is nothing in Australia’s constitution that says you have a right to drive everywhere and, as a culture, we drive way too much and use our own bodies way too little. But, if you are going to close fire trails just be courageous and do the difficult thing and shut them permanently to all but non-motorized users; instead of the “temporary become permanent” closures which is how most things are done. It’s cowardly.

Anyway, the roads were closed so we would have to walk in. We drove along the annoyingly corrugated open fire trail to an intersection and parked the van. We carried our rock climbing gear and set off. We were able to jump across the first ford, but further on where the road intersects a bigger river the road bed was completely flooded. We tried hopping across on various slippery logs which had toppled over but in the end had to take shoes off and wade across the knee deep river. A bit further on and we were able to balance with only a minor booter (a booter is when you accidentally get wet feet trying to cross a stream) across yet another creek.

I had my topographic map handy as there were many junctions we needed to make and at one point, noticing another small crag on the map I wondered if I might have marked the crag wrong. But we never seriously entertained the notion and kept walking. Eventually, we walked out to the turn around at a little lookout where bogans had been throwing their drink cans into the bush (half the reason roads get closed) and spent a goodly amount of time trying to find the crag. Nothing was quite right and the rock was not even conducive to climbing. Eventually, while we had lunch we pulled the latitude and longitude off the Crag guide and noticed we were indeed at the wrong location.

We had, however, blown through so much time that even though we would walk back past the crag we didn’t really have enough daylight to squeeze in a climb and drive home, so we walked on past contenting ourselves with catching a glimpse of some rock through the trees.

Ironically, when we got home, our handy trip database – in which we have recorded all our major trips for the better part of 30 years – indicated we had been to the crag before and climbed a few pitches!

The Undead

The Sunday paddles are, at least as a regular event, over. This is actually the second time I’ve binned the Sunday paddles. The first time was back in 2024 when interest and attendance was repeatedly poor. I don’t why I thought I could turn a trickle into a deluge after the passage of two years with more people than ever out of the game unless perhaps I have a God delusion and think that I can somehow turn water into wine, bread into fish, and non-interest into enthusiasm.

Mentally, this is a tough call to make because I am essentially giving up and if there is one thing that really signals weakness to me it is giving up. Seth Godin, in his book, The Dip, argues that winners know when to quit and when to keep going. Dips are temporary set backs which require a no quit attitude while cul-de-sacs are dead ends where no amount of perseverance will create a path forward. Dips are a bit like over-reaching during a training cycle. You get fatigued, a bit stiff and sore, but, if you manage your training correctly, you are stronger and fitter than ever at the end of the training cycle. I am so used to pushing the fatigue (both mental andphysical), soreness, even boredom at the repetitiveness involved in training that I take that attitude to everything. It works for training but it will never turn a cul de sac into a highway.

When you come back to first principles, the purpose of the Sunday paddles was myriad and yet none of those many goals were being met. In group situations, there is always a social element, and, as I live like a hermit because of my difficulty in finding people who enjoy doing what I do, that was an important goal. But I also wanted to be out with people who like being challenged and valued improving their skills. At the outset, the Sunday paddles were meant to include some skills practice, but very few people are interested in improving their skills even when doing so will open the door to a much wider range of possible experiences. Sea kayaking, particularly under calm conditions is actually a low skill sport where you can complete many, many trips with very little skill.

Last Sunday, I actually had three people show up. One regular (who I will continue to paddle with outside the Sunday paddles) and two paddlers from the ACT who wanted to go from ungraded to Grade Two. I ran them through some of the basic skills that constitute the Grade Two skill set although I could tell by they way they held their paddles, sat in the boat, just generally moved that they were a long, long way off. Initially, I thought I might be able to tick them off on a rescue if not the actual paddle skills but even that was not possible. If you can’t competently complete a simple rescue in calm conditions there is no way you’ll manage in a real situation.

Way back in 2020 after the fires came through and the lockdowns followed, I ran Sunday paddles for almost an entire year and they were quite successful. I even had double digit participants and we did a lot of really interesting paddles in a great variety of conditions. It’s hard to admit that those days are over, but they are and no amount of wishful thinking will bring them back. In a way, it’s a metaphor for everything in life. I used to be able to squat my body weight, but I can’t now and no amount of training will get me back to that point. I can hang on to what I have and I can maximise what I can do, but I cannot, like Jesus, turn the dead into the living.