Last Days in Australia

I return to the U.S. tomorrow (7/14/25) after a three-week sojourn in Australia.

This time in my homeland was focused on my mum and her move to the assisted-living part of the retirement village that’s been her home in Port Macquarie since 2013 – first with dad and then, after his passing in 2019, on her own.

As difficult as I find it to leave my mum and family at this time, I’m choosing to do so with an abundance of gratitude in my heart.

First and foremost, I am grateful for the remarkable recovery mum has made (and continues to make) from the stroke she experienced in early April.

I am grateful for the many people who have helped facilitate and guide mum's recovery – from family members and friends to the staff at the various medical facilities mum has stayed at – culminating in her move to the assisted-living hostel that is now her home.

I am grateful for the ways mum has chosen to respond to the challenges and changes in her life. They are ways of grace and gratitude, surrender and trust.

Finally, I am grateful for the opportunities I’ve had these past three weeks to be mindfully and lovingly present to my mum, my family and friends, and the Australian landscape. Such mindful and loving presence has made a difference, a transformative difference, in my life and the lives of others. Familial bonds have been deepened, friendships strengthened, and I’ve experienced a grounding connection with the land and the healing energies that imbue it.

For all of these things I am grateful.

God of mystery and unimaginable inventiveness, who has created each of us in all our beauty and multifaceted energies, we give thanks this day for what we are and for what we have, for our own mysterious life forces and for our hopes for more of this life tomorrow. We simply give thanks to be and to be ourselves and to be linked to those we love. Give us courage for the unique life journey that is ours, and give us spiritedness to live it joyfully.

– William Cleary
From We Side with the Morning:
Daily Prayers to the God of Hope
Sorin Books (2009)

The landscape itself [is] plural, ever-changing, a festival of light and rock, always different, and so naturally this complex world [gives] rise to many stories, to many myths of place.

– David Tacey
From Edge of the Sacred:
Transformation in Australia
HarperCollins (1995)

NEXT:
Back in Minneapolis

Australian Sojourn – June-July 2025
• Solstice Dawn
• Home to Be With Mum
• This Moment
• Australian Indigenous Culture and the Reality of LGBTI Lives
• June Vignettes
• “A Mysteriously Charged and Magnificently Alive Archetypal Presence”
• Warumpi Band
• Family Time in Guruk
• Journey to Gulmarrad
• An Australian Spirituality: “A Festival of Light and Rock”

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Gifts of Abundance
• Giving Thanks: A Spiritual Act of Trust
• Grief and Gratitude

Images: Michael J. Bayly and Brendan Bayly.

An Australian Spirituality: “A Festival of Light and Rock”

Following is a second excerpt from David Tacey’s 1995 book Edge of the Sacred: Transformation in Australia. (For the first excerpt, click here.)

Our spiritual way here [in Australia] cannot be, as was said by Hermes Trismegistus and other real or legendary Europeans, an opus contra naturam, a work against nature. There is too much nature in Australia, too much rock, too much prima materia or untransformed matter. If we heroically pitted ourselves against nature here in a bid to transform nature into spirit, we would go mad, breakdown, or be consumed by nature. The entire heroic fantasy about subduing nature, conquering Gaia or controlling Mother Earth is a European fantasy, which can never work in Australia. This country demands a different archetypal style, a style that works with nature rather than against it. The very notion that spirit is opposed to matter cannot take root here. Our spiritual mode will have to be ecological, a work with nature, an opus cum natura.

In this important aspect we must take our cue from the Aboriginal people and not from Western Europe. Herein lies what must be regional, local, or particular about an Australian spirituality. We cannot simply import Judeo-Christianity into this country and think that this will suffice. It won’t work, because it is based solidly on masculine and dualistic notions of spirit and matter that can make little sense here. The Australian Way will have to be ecological, like the Aboriginal people themselves. The new spirituality that arises from Australian experience will, I believe, be precisely the kind of spirituality that will set a timely example to the rest of the world. It will be non-heroic and will not go the way of the now exhausted heroism of Western Europe or North America. It will not be patriarchal, because the Earth Mother is far too strong here.

. . . My own experience in Alice Springs taught me to love and respect the Earth Mother in ways that I could not have achieved while living in Melbourne. It was the Earth Mother and her stony landscape that broke the encasement of my rational ego and drew me into a larger sense of identity, that opened up a dialogue between myself and the archetypal other. Naturally the vast expanses and the sheer weight of all this rock terrified me at times, and one can easily feel crushed by it. But Australian landscape is like the unconscious itself: if you respect it and realise the ego can never hope to assimilate, conquer, or transform it, you are allowed to survive. That is and must be our way, a humble aboriginal way, a shamanic way. Les Murray has said that the sheer space and size of this country is “one of the great, poorly explored spiritual resources of Australia,” since “in the huge spaces of the outback, ordinary souls expand into splendid [forms].” Randolph Stow has pointed out that “when one is alone with [the country], one feels in one way very small, in another gigantic.” The actual ego-personality is dwarfed and made to feel quite small and puny, but the soul leaps out of its human encasement and ecstatically unites with the greater world. “Alone in the bush, with maybe a single crow . . . a phrase like ‘liberation of the spirit’ may begin to sound meaningful.”

. . . I have felt that the rocks and mountain ranges of central Australia were large enough to accommodate many Dreamings: perhaps a different dreaming for everyone who comes into geophysical contact with them. The fact that there could be many Dreamings did not, for me, cancel out the validity or importance of my own or any other dreaming. The landscape itself was plural, ever-changing, a festival of light and rock, always different, and so naturally this complex world would give rise to many stories, to many myths of place. In my heart I realized the priority and respected the major status of the Aboriginal stories that had already accounted for the places that I mooned around as a boy. But I always felt, arrogantly perhaps, that there was still room for my own psychic participation in the land. It had already happened anyway, and it was not something I could call a stop to on political, ideological, racial, or any other grounds.

– David J. Tacey
Excerpted from Edge of the Sacred:
Transformation in Australia
HarperCollins (1995)
pp. 23-26

NEXT:
Last Days in Australia

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Recognising and Honoring Australia’s First Naturalists
• On Sacred Ground (2019)
• In the Land of the Kamilaroi (2019)
• Guruk Seascapes, From Dawn to Dusk (2017)
• Australian Sojourn – May 2016
• Earth Day 2015
• Prayer of the Week – November 14, 2012
• Rock of Ages: Theological Reflections on Picnic at Hanging Rock
• Afternoon
• Boorganna (Part I)
• Boorganna (Part II)
• My “Bone Country” (2009)
• Alva Beach (2006)
• The Landscape Is a Mirror
• “Something Sacred Dwells There”

Australian Sojourn – June-July 2025
• Solstice Dawn
• Home to Be With Mum
• This Moment
• Australian Indigenous Culture and the Reality of LGBTI Lives
• June Vignettes
• “A Mysteriously Charged and Magnificently Alive Archetypal Presence”
• Warumpi Band
• Family Time in Guruk
• Journey to Gulmarrad

Images: Michael J. Bayly (except image 3 which is of Jamie Gulpilil in the 2006 film Ten Canoes, and image 4 which is artwork by Ainslie Roberts).

Journey to Gulmarrad

Yesterday, Brendan and I made a quick trip north to Gulmarrad, just outside of Maclean in Northern Rivers Country. Here we stayed with my dear friends Mike, Bernie, and Collette.

Above and below: With Brendan and Collette at Yamba this morning.

NEXT:
An Australian Spirituality:
“A Festival of Light and Rock”

Australian Sojourn – June-July 2025
• Solstice Dawn
• Home to Be With Mum
• This Moment
• Australian Indigenous Culture and the Reality of LGBTI Lives
• June Vignettes
• “A Mysteriously Charged and Magnificently Alive Archetypal Presence”
• Warumpi Band
• Family Time in Guruk


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Happy Birthday, Bernie! (2024)
• Mooloolaba (2023)
• In Northern Rivers Country (2019)
• Townsville (2016)
• A Journey to Northern Rivers Country (2015)
• Raph’s Inspiring Journey (2014)
• Raph’s Journey Continues
• A Surprise for Raph! . . . Well, Somewhat
• Return to Oz . . . Sydney to Be Exact!
• Our Sacred Journey Continues: An All Saints and Souls Day Reflection
• Leichhardt (2012)
• A Bushland Wedding (2011)
• The Australian Floods
• Rising Waters
• “Flooded-In But Loving Life”
• In Maclean, an End to the “Siege”
• Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast (2010)
• A Day Roving the Mid North Coast
• Newtown (2008)
• A Fresh Take on Masculinity (2006)
• The Australian Roots of My Progressive Catholicism
• Remnants of a Past Life
• More Remnants of a Life Past

Images: Michael J. Bayly.

Family Time in Guruk

I’m currently in my homeland of Australia where I’m spending time with my family – my mum in particular. As some reading this will already know, mum has recently had some health issues.

I noted previously that although she continues to make a good recovery from the stroke she experienced in April (just a day after my return to the U.S. after a month-long visit), mum has moved into the assisted-living hostel that’s part of the retirement village in Port Macquarie that’s been her home since 2013, first with dad and then, after his passing in 2019, on her own.

For the first half of my time here I was by myself at mum’s villa, visiting mum once or twice a day in the assisited-living hostel that’s walking distance from here. My sister-in-law, who lives with my brother about an hour-and-a-half south of Port Macquarie, has been doing a geat job at posting on Facebook Marketplace pictures and descriptions of the bigger items of furnitire that can’t fit in mum’s room at the hostel. I've been meeting people as they come to the villa to collect the items they’ve bought, oftentimes helping them load them into their vechile. The villa needs to be emptied and vacated by the end of July.

I've also been going through my own things that have been stored for years in mum’s garage, and organizing a small storage unit in town in which I’ll pay to have them safely kept moving forward.

As often as I can, I go to Shelly Beach or Town Beach and watch the sunrise. This continues to be a very grounding, very anchoring way to start each day.

I even saved a baby shark one morning! . . . The image at right of a young grey nurse shark at left is not mine; it is, however, a picture of the type of shark I came across on the morning of June 26 after it was stranded at low tide among rocks on Shelly Beach. Lifting and carrying this young shark by its tail, I brought it to the shallows and (as gently as I could) threw it into the sea. I’m happy to say that I soon spied its two fins cutting through the water before disappearing beneath the waves. It was clearly making its way back out to sea. 🦈

Above: Mum and her former neighbor Glynnis – Friday, June 27, 2025.

As I noted previously, I arrived in Guruk (aka Port Macquarie) at around noon on Saturday, June 21. After showering and freshing up at mum’s villa, I decided that before visiting mum in her new home, I would call in on her neighbor Glynnis who lives in the villa next door. I did so to thank her for the crucial role she played back in April in notifying my brother of her concerns about mum, whom she hadn’t seen for a number of days. Thanks to Glyniss, family and paramedics were able to come and get into mum’s villa, find her down and unconscious, and take her to the hospital.

Above: Mum being visited by her neice (my cousin) Sharon and Sharon’s spouse Ross – Friday, June 27, 2025.

Above and below: On the weekend of June 28-29, 2025, my aunt Ruth (mum’s younger sister) travelled by bus to Guruk from our hometown of Gunnedah. It was great to see and spend time with her.

Above and left: My neice, the award-winning author and illustrator Sami Bayly, at her booth at Port Macquarie’s annual ArtWalk, a “galactic night of creativity and wonder” – July 4, 2025.

Above and below: My nephew Brendan, who arrived from the United Kingdom (via China) to Guruk on Saturday, July 5. First thing the next day I took him to watch the sunrise on Shelly Beach.

Brendan’s staying with me at the villa, and together we’ve been going through and sorting stuff, visiting “grandma” everyday, helping make her new place more homey, and taking her out to lunch with her longtime Port Macquarie friends, something she hasn’t done since before her stroke in April.

Opening image and above and below: Family time in Guruk – July 2025.

Brendan’s older brother Ryan soon joined us in the villa with his two young sons, Ramy and Jake – my great-nephews and mum’s great-grandsons. They came all the way from Melbourne.

Above: Brendan and Ramy chattng with Glynnis in the warm winter sun – July 9, 2025.

Above: Jake, preparing what he called “frog soup” for his great-grandma, who, judging from her expression below, didn’t find it very appealing. 🤣

Above: Great-grandma is always a good sport, even to the point of happily posing with her beloved great grandsons and the “frog soup” they made for her.

Above and below: On Tuesday, July 8, Brendan and I took mum/grandma out to lunch with a number of her Port Macquarie friends.

Above: My neice Layne, an accomplished tattoo artist, delights Ramy and Jake with her many beautiful tattoos – Wednesday, July 9, 2025.

Above: Ramy and Jake say goodbye to great-grandma – Thursday, July 10, 2025.


NEXT:
Journey to Gulmarrad

Australian Sojourn – June-July 2025
• Solstice Dawn
• Home to Be With Mum
• This Moment
• Australian Indigenous Culture and the Reality of LGBTI Lives
• June Vignettes
• “A Mysteriously Charged and Magnificently Alive Archetypal Presence”
• Warumpi Band

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• In Birpai Country
• Last Days in Guruk (April 2025)
• Family Time in Melbourne, Guruk, and Gunnedah (2023)
• Return to Guruk (2019)
• Family Time in Guruk . . . and Glimpses of Somaliland (2019)
• Across the Mountains
• Guruk Seascapes, From Dawn to Dusk
• Port Macquarie Days
• Thanks, Mum!
• Happy Birthday, Mum! – 2024 | 2018 | 2017 | 2014 | 2013 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009
• Congratulations, Mum and Dad! (2009)
• Catholic Rainbow (Australian) Parents (2006)
• Trusting the Flow
• Surrendering in Sacred Trust
• The Guidance of Higher Forces
• A Prayer of Anchoring
• Resting in the Presence of the Beloved
• A New Day
• The Art of Gentle Revolution

Images: Michael J. Bayly.