Bush Salon, Wee Jasper, February 2016

We had another bush salon weekend recently. These are becoming popular events for developing our ‘collective walking’ methods. A group of us (Australians and Canadian visitors) got together to do some Slow Creek Walking. It was hot, and we spent most of our time lounging around in the creek, lying on rocks and relaxing under casurina trees. It was indeed, very slow.

To prepare for the event, we read Astrida Neimanis’ chapter ‘Hydrofeminisms: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water’ and Lesley Instone and my article ‘Thinking about inheritance through the Figure of the Anthropocene …’ that describes the messy entanglements of pastpresent lives, elements and weatherings in this particular limestone river valley. The idea was to practise Isobelle Stenger’s ‘slow’ collective thinking as we walked along Micalong Creek and to produce some kind of ‘common account’ along the way. Astrida’s ‘hydro-logics’ encouraged us to push the possibilities for ambulatory creek thinking beyond the somewhat obvious and romantic notion of flow.

It was the transcorporeal rub of creek water, river rocks and human bodies that emerged from our collective thinking and common accounting. The co-shapings of this geo-hydro-bio assemblage was literally ‘felt’ through the bruising imprints of river rocks on our bodies; and ‘felted’ into small pods through the friction of fingers, soapy wet wool and tumbled-smooth creek pebbles.

Affrica Taylor