Movement in the water
11 May 2021 - April 2023
On New Years eve 2021, it rained. It rained and it rained and it rained. It didn’t stop raining for 3 days straight. 150mm fell in one night. In the beginning, the sound of the rain was gentle, but persistent. However, after many hours of the sound of rain, its presence began to generate anxiety.
Drop by drop, the whole township flooded. Our creek, where the eel lives, transformed into a raging torrent.
We went out with bolt cutters to cut fences to shift stock to higher ground. We went out to try and save our neighbours house from flooding. I went out to dig ditches and devised ways to convert the water away from my studio, and our home.
I have been keeping an eye on the eel in the creek, for 10 years.
When we first shifted to this neck of the woods, my mother and I used to go down the creek on a Friday evening to have a glass of wine. We noticed the eel & started to feed it. Over time we came to appreciate the mysterious creature, and all the while we sort of suspected it would one day disappear, but it didn’t.
It stayed in the creek. Visitors and children delighted to go down there and visit the eel. Often I would take solace when life got tough, to go down there and sit by the water & feed the eel. We learnt a lot about the eel, its life span, it's feeding habits, the habitat it likes to live in. Long fin eels are endangered.
It rained. It rained and it rained & we thought it would never stop raining.
When the raging torrent of the water swirled and streamed over the paddocks, I thought about the eel & what it would be like to be down there, under the side of a bank while the volumes of water sped with force all around.
When the water subsided, rumours started. People with lumpy custard for brains told half baked stories. They said it was our fault that the township had flooded, because of the eel.
A fella turned up last year from the council, who was doing some flood protection work along the creek beds. He was there with his big orange digger, scouring out the creek beds & banking it up on the sides. We asked him to spare about 1 meter down where the eel lives, so she could still have her home. He wasn’t very impressed with the request, but he did it anyway. A bloke with a big machine.
Later, covid happened. Everything was shutdown. We were shut down with an enormous orange digger in our paddock for more than 6 months, long after the lockdowns ended. People got talking & someone came up with the idea that we must have stopped the digging somehow, and we were to blame for the flooding… because of the eel.
When the clouds parted, I stood outside and gazed at the Rock & Pillar Range. But I wasn’t looking, I was listening. What I was listening to was the sound of many waterfalls, a sound that nobody had ever heard here in their whole lifetimes. It was the sound of the mountains song, an ancient sound. A sound you hear when the earth is telling you to listen.
Couple day’s later, we went for a walk up at the foot of the mountain. Whole boulders and massive slices of creek banks had been washed away, rocks lifted and thrown at either side of the creeks. The mountain was scarred with slips. We noticed and observed where the creeks converged together, the flattened paddocks, the evidence of the enormous force of water which had sped down towards the township from the mountain.
Experts said that they had never seen anything quite like it.
On a calm day when the sun started to shine & the water become clear, I went down to the eel hole, to check if she was still there.
Her eely body slid out from under the remains of her eel home, and swam gracefully over to take some food from off a stick.. She had survived the floods. She knew nothing about the lumpy custard for brains.
I went down several times afterwards and fed the eel, last time I saw her it was a magic moment. I was standing in the water and she came right up to my hands in the water, I had a piece of food, she took it, and then she let me hold her in the water underneath her belly, she felt smooth, cold and velvety.
After that I never saw her again.
I went down there last time and stood in the creek & I swear I could feel the magnetic pull in the water, a pull that the eels must feel when they know it is time to go, time to go to the ocean, to spawn, to die, to surrender their life. To live by the laws of nature and its wisdom, to feel no fear and to be free.
Written by Johanna Qiao Tong
2021-2023
