" ... Spending transitional time between a waning crescent and waxing crescent moon on vibrant Worimi Country on the cusp of “Hairy Grub” (Balay) season as the Gunyah Artist-in-Residence at Kath Fries’ and associates’ pole-and-beam house in North Arm Cove has been a grounding and nurturing way to formally invoke new directions in my work, in preparation for a seasonal (interior) shift inland.
‘Balay’ is the Worimi word for the hairy caterpillars that climb down from the trees when temperatures begin to cool, heralding the advent of the mullet (Biiwa) who begin to school at this time in preparation for northerly migration. During my fortnight’s residency at The Gunyah, I rested, swam, daydreamed, walked, made leaf-and-seed-prints and wrote among the remnant Red and Grey Ironbarks and Coastal Sheoaks (Casuarina equisetifolia) that grace both the shore frontage of The Gunyah, its adjacent fire tracks through bush and scrub, and the Sheoak rich walking areas of nearby Hawks Nest, some of which amble between tidal mangroves and their breathing Pneumatophores root systems.
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| Shari Lynelle, Gunyah shore frontage and Sheoak branches. |
Upon my first morning of arrival, Kookaburra (Gaaku) alighted on the deck railings and checked me out most thoroughly; we chatted, and I felt welcome. White Bellied Sea Eagle (Gan Gan) paid a shiver-close visit just above my head (and thereby entered a poem-in-progress) sitting on the deck during the new moon dusk. Upon departure, two cheeky Magpies (Ngaambuls) transmitted an energetic guardian-feeling farewell, hopping up and down the steps as I was packing the car, waiting until I had finally closed the boot and returned the key to its holder under the house before gifting me with an emphatic speech-song, each-to-each, head cocked to the side until I replied, another burst of speech-song, each-to-each, then two ‘satisfied’ hops (it seemed) up to the roof of my car—such clear communicators! I thought—before they swooped away. By more-than-human others, I certainly felt met in this place. Respect and gratitude to Worimi Elders past and present, and to all the ancestors of the skies, lands and waterways, who are clearly being kept, sung, tended, alive. This land was never ceded. The private water frontages that sit on top of all of this remarkable ongoing Worimi Country also hover eerily, in certain lights, ill-at-ease.
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| Shari Lynelle, Gunyah deck. |
Grateful, yet tired from the journey from Djaara Country in central Vitoria and all the anxieties of making a trip such as this in these times, I devoted ample rest and reading time to the first week of my stay, during which, in particular, I paid attention to the oral testimonies of Elder Worimi women in Aboriginal Women’s Heritage: Port Stephens (2004). These women’s stories led me one hot afternoon to pay a welcome visit to the Murrook Cultural Centre, where I learnt more about the sheer determination of the Land Council wins led by Worimi Elders over the last thirty years, and since colonisation. The Murrook Cultural Centre is a testament to the strength, community and knowledge-keeping evident in the Elder women’s stories, and their cross-generational achievements are seeding futures I highly encourage everyone visiting this area to listen to. Murrook Cultural Centre grounded me further in thinking about what the word ‘Gunyah’ means in Worimi in relation to ‘shelter’ and provided both welcome conversational encounter, as well as further reading and listening, including digital oral histories and a memoir written by Worimi Elder Lorraine Lilley, Mop Dolly: my comforting toy (2024).
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| Shari Lynelle, Gunyah jetty and Sheoaks |
Oriented then, while feeling sheltered as a guest on Country nourished by Worimi women’s lifeways and stories, I rested among sheoaks, those “babysitter trees” whose beds of needles make resting among them safe from snakes. Kath shared an informative article written by Trisha Ellis on the properties of Indigenous knowledge-keeping in relation to embodied Sheoaks in community. By the third or fourth day of my stay, I had fallen into a haptic trance of ‘listening-with’ the sheoak groves, lulled by the susurrating laplap of the Gunyah waters all around, from whose presence I asked permission to gather a few fallen forms in the shapes of sheoak needles, pods, twigs, banksia leaves, seeds, seaweed and bark.
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| Shari Lynelle, Gunyah studio |
These became the figurative mark-making (more-than-human) transmitters as I explored their various invitational responses to being ‘im-printed’ or ‘im-pressed’ with, on two geli-plates using acrylic paints set up in the wet-area studio downstairs. My days took on a slow making-and-listening rhythm. Print making in morning light in the studio surrounded by birdsong after breakfast felt delightful. I took frequent breaks between waiting for first print pulls and shadow-prints to dry in experimental layers downstairs, during which I either headed down the sloping path, back to water, or upstairs to the window-seat, or deck, to read and daydream, or roamed on beach walks over at Hawk’s Nest, listening to various whispering lines of sheoak magic being carried on the wind.
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| Shari Lynelle, Gunyah geli-plate print |
These whispers followed into dreaming with the haptic sensations of the materials I’d handled during the day, sometimes forming colourful, tactile (synaesthetic) patterns in my sleep. Translating these visual and haptic notes, I jotted word-clusters first thing every morning and carried a pocket notebook around throughout my time at Gunyah. On very hot days, I left both prints and poems and snorkelled at high tide around the rocks and Gunyah jetty, though the presence of fins (hopefully dolphins) nevertheless had me on edge at times, thinking about bull sharks and belonging and their presence in the stories in relation to the female oyster divers in this place, too. Whenever I had these story-line-impress-ions while swimming, I got out of the water ‘real quick’! The super-saturated salt content of these tidal waters have an instant refreshment effect, and maybe the quick, short doses of adrenaline kept me sharp? Who knows. I don’t think I saw any bull sharks, but really, I can’t be sure. I do know now that fish jump.
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| Shari Lynelle, Gunyah geli-plate print |
Towards the end of my stay, I lay out some of the more supposedly ‘successful’ or intriguing prints on the long kitchen table and leant into whatever profusion of colours and forms had risen to the surface. As ever, though, I discovered I was more struck by the beautiful surprises inherent in most of my ‘failures’ and from these, wrote line-clusters on tissue-paper scraps, with which I set about printing again in layers, so that the active agency of needles and seedpod and other organic matter might have the chance to press further patterns, or softened blurs, into trailing, worded lines. This experiment served a further loosening or letting go of all artistic control. I kept going with this, but then felt I had ‘ruined’ some of my favourite visual prints along the way, and yet, when I came to look again, there were the marks of the sheoaks themselves, sometimes sea-weeded, or seed-podded, shining through.
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| Shari Lynelle, geli-plate prints and notes at Gunyah |
From there, I handwrote first and subsequent early drafts of about half a dozen new poems into a large black folio notebook, with an equal number of selected prints accompanying these compositional, or ‘vocabularied’ poetic renderings. I then placed the abundance of all the other Sheoak prints and papers (muddy failures included) into a pair of A4 and A3 folio folders and began the process of closing the first stage of this ‘seeding’ circle, with devotional thanks directed into cleaning tasks, as well as sitting again by water under the murmuring sheoak groves. The sunsets at Gunyah are ethereal as the bush along the green landmass across the water catches in reflection the setting sunlight through leaves and limbs that mirror in the water the sheerest floating hues of pink and lilac.
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| Shari Lynelle, view from Gunyah's deck |
On my last day, a fierce cross-wind sprung up over the bay, the waters of which, for the greater part of my stay, had remained glassy. I judged the cross-winds to be east-north-easterly winds meeting south-westerlies, and in the white-capped, widening current this cross-directional frission created, fish were visibly jumping, and finally, pods of dolphins came into view.
I sat for over an hour at the end of the jetty watching dolphins (too many to count) trawl the cross-winds in their lithe and graceful embodiment, and two broke away from their pod and came right up to where I was holding onto my hat in the high wind. After weaving circles in front of me, with their mesmerizingly fluid skin-suits, one offered the flute of a final sideways leap, close enough to glimpse an actual glance—my heart leapt with the intelligence of that fleeting, but curious, inter-species-eye-lock, as the pair took off underwater, returning to the white-capped windfall of fish jumping out in the deep current of the bay. This dolphin gift, or glancing sensation of seeing-another, of being beheld by a lively more-than-human gaze, rippled into my being with the tangible energetics of encounter, and entanglement, in a respectful and buoyant closure to my numinous time at Gunyah.
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| Shari Lynelle, Gunyah geli-plate print |
The creative invocation of a new body of poems thinking-with and through the lifeways and gifts of Sheoaks and other She-creatures is only just beginning. My intention is that this new work will continue to grow quietly of its own accord while unfurling tender roots and tendrils, as I turn in the coming months to invest in the ‘finishing energy’ of launching my third collection, Lunette, with Rabbit Poets Series, in May/June this year. In non-linear time I trust this seeded new work will be wending its ways beyond Lunette into gestational, circling return.
New creative work has begun its tangible incubation by having first been sheltered on Worimi Country, seeded by Worimi Sheoaks on wing and wind. Gratitude to this place, its Spirit and its First peoples, and to Kath and crew for the offering of hospitality to artists and writers and thinkers and makers. Reading the visitor book entries over many volumes and thinking about the communities and collectives this place has supported was another highlight of my stay.
Thankyou, Thankyou, Thankyou. May we continue to lean into the fourth tense of the otherhow futures we are being asked to dare to inhabit, to action and to dream. ..."
Gunyah residency report, March 2026
Shari Lynelle @shari.lynelle
