Yallingup Sliding

The barren joy of Western Australia. Picture six friends living in a sixties brick home, their doorstep an operative cattle station, their back verandah a life-raft of conversation and laughter in the solitude of the outback. 



A swimmer at the bottom of the world





Life's in-betweens and the importance of everything
18.02.2025        Miica Balint


My notes from the West have been bucked off-course by a wild mare of a week. Not in a fretful sense, terror has not been creeping into my folds of sleep, nor terrorising my days, but rather I am in the thick of a ‘get a grip or fall off the mountain’ tumult of starting a new job.
It would have been clever to have written of the month I spent in the raw, rough and desperately, immensely, outrageously, beautiful land that grew me while I was there, or in the days that shadowed my return to our Northern Rivers region, but alas. Instead, I sit here in a tropical stick so sweet it could almost fool me into thinking I could go outside and burrow into the cool red dirt underneath the stilted home of my childhood, and watch the humidity build, and build, until the sky would crack.

And though where I grew up we too had monsoonal downpours, the Kimberley sits where the desert meets a bloated, full of life, coastline. Rain pours through the pindan dirt to the sea, waterholes fill, tides swell, and yet in comparison to where I now call home, the land is dry.

We flew back from West Australia into one of our region’s summer downpours. Driving slowly, safely, through the wet, the difference between the salty desert land that we bid adieu to in the sunrise-hours, and where we had just arrived, was jarring.

You know how they say the grass is always greener, the grass for me coming back home was too green. My house was being swallowed by grasses taller than the tops of our windows. Weeds were lapping up Kate’s part of the house and cane toads had made a safe bet of security on her carpet, no longer finding threat to the cricket bat living in the corner of her room. Green mould was creeping in and taking refuge in anything woollen.

In the days that followed, Sou and I tried to replicate the West. We cut my native zoysia grass to its roots, so short that it was the beige colour reminiscent of the cream-coloured fields of our friend’s ranch in Yallingup, we created a creek-bed with sandstone,—to mitigate the occasional rain overflow—planted native swamp shrubs evocative of the biodiverse native bush of the south-west coast, such as tea-tree and bottlebrush, and drowned out grass zones with cardboard and woodchip.

While taking the time to recalibrate, I took solace in the memory of a conversation with a new friend. Weeks prior, from a verandah that sat as our floating raft in the darkness of the outback, this new friend had spoken to the theory of liminal space. Go slow, be gentle, understand that any pace that is unnatural, or transitions through space, can put us off balance. This goes from driving over a bridge to flying through the air, and I think, it goes for everything in life’s in-between. Go slow, be gentle.

Time has adapted me back into the rhythm of our town, and with my natives now robustly growing in my garden, here are some notes that I can recount, of the west.


You could place Fremantle—the first coastal town you arrive to from our nation’s wheatbelt—into the Mediterranean, and no one would know any different. Olive trees and grapes shade gardens of terracotta pots, everybody has a pushie (bicycle), the streets are limestone, wild sunflowers are carried by the cool afternoon breeze we rely upon (the freo doctor), the ocean is still and the fish, fresh.
The vast, barren, wheatbelt separates two places my mama calls home. On one side is a small, full of life two-but-we-made-it-three-bedroom life-boat in Fremantle, that she has been renting since I was in university, of which the five of us have all tried each room.

And on the other, she now shares a smaller, more spectacularly special home, with her found-partner-in-life, in the coastal town of Denmark. The embrace of my mother’s homes, both with doors taken off their hinges—for no reason other than to open up the space—is one you cannot replicate.

Days run long in Denmark. There, the ocean is wooly, the forrest tall, and granite rocks tower over the land as ancestors, keeping watch. One afternoon as we were pulling into Kathy (mother) and Jim’s (found-life-partner) driveway—a sweet pebblecrete house on a ‘suburban’ plot sitting at the bottom of a valley of tall, tall, trees—their neighbour was putting out the bins across the road.

I was introduced, Paul is a presenter for Denmark FM, was wearing a shirt that said ‘Who is going to make the gravy?’, and was informing me of the devastating prescribed burning plans in place for the giant tingle tree forests. Since meeting this new-found friend there has been a rally to protect these towering trees that only exist in that part of the world. When I know more, you will too.

Then Paul said something that had me fall over. In glee. He knew of the magazine, our magazine, somehow, through an independent media outlet from Melbourne, he recalled. In a small town far from here, someone that loves a good story, reads us. The first moment of many similar I hope.

There is more to be said of the importance of spending time with people, your people, in their sixties brick six-bedroom home, who also have time free from work. Time to crayfish, time to divulge into conversations of biochar and compost, time to take lounge chairs into their greenhouse and strum on instruments to their seedlings, time to harvest a roo killed by the car in front of them and make biltong. Time to sit, and laugh, and stretch out the creases in our bodies. I could go on, but there are articles recently published to be read.

Simplicity, slowness and the importance of everything, is what is on our mind, and this has been channelled into our website revamp. We hope it reflects our clarity.

Thank you, always,

Miica