This cliff top site is a studio, an art gallery and a concert hall playing the music of place (breakers, birds, sea breeze in the Casuarinas), and takes in all the senses from breathing oceanic air to the kinaesthetic - making the experience so much richer than watching a screen.

This environment has changed in just over a hundred years, this was Gumbaynggirr Country, being a prominent feature, a songline site with a Gumbaynggirr name. There was no lookout called Captain Cook’s, and no road up here, and no breakwalls below, changing the river’s meander. Birdsong would have filled the air and the estuary would have floated nawis (bark canoes) used for river crossings, fishing and storytelling. Yaam nganyundi wajaarr. This is my Country, you would have heard.

Despite the losses, it remains a wonderful environment, and healthy. Plenty of research finds that being with birds and trees benefits mental and physical health, whereas, social media can damage mental and physical health.
The new networked media are energised by a desperate for attention and novelty. We have inherited these appetites, seen in the arts as well as consumer fashion, from 19th century revolutions in manufacturing and consumerism. The latest giant TikTok, a video hosting service, gained over 1 billion monthly active users earlier this year, with 1.8 billion predicted by the end of 2022. TikTok themes in order of popularity are: Entertainment, 535 billion hashtag views; Dance, 181 billion; Pranks, 79 billion; Fitness/sports, 57 billion; Home reno/D.I.Y. 39 billion; Beauty/skincare – 33 billion; Fashion – 27 billion; Recipes/cooking – 18 billion. These are alternative worlds without birdsong.

Even this business of writing, trying to tie things together, of making connections is stimulating. Ted Hughes experienced that, ‘special kind of excitement, the slightly mesmerised and quite involuntary concentration with which you make out the stirrings of a new poem in your mind.’
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Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making, Faber and Faber, 1967.

https://influencermarketinghub.com/tiktok-stats/ [DL.18.8.2022]Daniel Ruby, ‘TikTok User Statistics (2022): How many TikTok Users Are There?’ August 19, 2022.

https://www.demandsage.com/tiktok-user-statistics/ [DL.9.10.2022]