Journey 4: The Farthest Edge (The Fruit-Bearing Tree)
A walking essay interweaving star constellations, ancestors, Australian climate justice and creative kinship along the Seven Sisters cliffs, UK.
Spring, dawning.
A speckled chalk and mud track beckons me up through sleek, bright green. Crowlink’s car park behind, and its hidden hamlet nearby, nestled in wind-leaning hedgerow, hawthorn and scrub. Salted scent of sea ahead. As I walked here, my half-opened eyes curled around tentacles of ivy roots, nudging primrose, daffodil and wild thyme, spotting one lit window facing seawards, ancient echo of a gin smuggling signal lookout two centuries back.
A brushstroke of cloud high under a halfmoon crescent is summoning the peach sun, its glow ebbing towards the lips of the sea. Striding upward, torn edges of rabbit burrows, like soft puncture wounds, almost trip me up. Softly grass, gently feet. I join a wide, neolithic pathway towards the cliffs, flanked by yellow spark mounds of Gorse vetch. The scent of coconut emanates from the warming air. Seagulls glide in on the morning breeze. Sheep are distant, rounding in on a farmer’s Landrover inching over the brow of a far hill. No wandering shepherds or whistles here.
Up, down and over – and then I see it, the outline form of a small sphinx or wonky buddha, my longed-for focal point on the horizon, facing the water. The Sarsen Stone. Or, William Charles Campbell Monument, as it is named on the Map. Hewn from the same silica and sandstone mix of Stonehenge and city kerb, its parent the post-glacial remains of a cap that once enveloped so much of the southern area of this warming island.
I trace the rusting ridges of the words on the stone’s turquoise plaque with my cold fingertips; this is a monument to a collective act of land defending between world wars, built not long after the Kinder Trespass up in the Peak district, where claiming the right to roam over private land birthed the nation’s first National Park. Here we are also in young National Park, the South Downs – and on National Trust land. But, back then, this area was open season for commercial prospecting and private enclosure. Perhaps war and suffrage had galvanised local Sussex Downsmen and Downswomen, aware of how much there was to lose for generations to come in the threatened sell-off of this entire belt of coastal gold. Local activism, donations and public subscription helped saved the valley here, and, towards the very end of the Sisters at Birling Gap, land bought and woods planted upon it blocked all road access, ensuring this free and open edge land channel for us all, now.
My eyes fix on the word Sarsen. Curious about the root of this word, I have been following medieval etymological trails: Sarsen, onto Saracen, connects to sandstone, desert, desert warrior, non-Christian, pagan, and - in particular, Muslims - of Arab, Turkish or Persian origin. Like my own maternal family and ancestors. Saracen. The definition goes further, is synonymous with theft, plunder and marauding, evoking violence during crusader resistance by the legendary Kurdish Sultan Saladin’s defence and capture of Jerusalem – and his invasions into Europe as far as France.
I look out to sea and notice a distant boat, bright blue with a bobbing red roof, heavy with humans, trailing eastwards. Without my glasses, it could be a pleasure boat, but it could also be a trafficker’s fragile vessel gone astray. Saracen. Image of ‘infidels’ in sacred lands, echoing now in the marked difference in welcome – depending on skin colour and religion – of those seeking safe refuge on this island of migrated peoples. Saracen. Is refuge as human right eroding like these cliffs?
Refuge in its softer sense is also what I seek here from town and traffic, to quietly reclaim time and space, with my body and gaze of Saracen and English ancestral lines, my notebook and pen. My back against the stone, I nestle onto the salt-aged wooden bench, sipping hot tea from my flask, biting into a boiled egg, mind settling. The sea is flat today, barely rippling. Stillness expanding into the infinite space ahead and above.
The water is full fuschia now, the sun’s solar tip glinting around the crown of Belle Tout lighthouse. Lighthouses evoke shipwrecks, and there are so many along this coastline, settled into dark sleep on the bubbling marine bed below. Just here, at lowest tide, one is still visible, poking through the water. This is my first encounter with it as my eyes pan down, expecting its broken ribs to be upright. But they lie flat, defeated, blackened spinal stubs lodged in between the scoops of wave-cut chalk, silver flashes of early sunlight catching on the water around them.
This wreck was a colonial clipper ploughing back and forth from south east Australia. I close my eyes and watch now through the storming darkness of a February dawn, 1876, as it sails safely past Rock Light, Scilly Isles and Cornwall, without the seasonal guiding star constellation of the Pleiades visible for navigation. The Pleiades, also known as The Seven Sisters cluster, the protectress of sailors, is obscured here by thickening mists, smothering also the hoped-for guiding light of Belle Tout further along.
At the ship’s prow, one arm stretched upwards, the wooden figurehead of a young girl in pastoral clothing shudders on first contact. Amid clouding skies and lashing wind, she succumbs to the unforgiving ripple of hard, black rock. Hard like the Captain, who had been determined to reach the markets first, pushing his crew too relentlessly to be safe, not dropping lead to check the water’s depth. This lone woman of timber – like so many at the frontline of storms, who were often blindfolded to placate the winds – feels the hot, rising panic of crew, hears the sharp shocked shouts as they hit land. An explosion of wood cracks and she is overturned, cast into freezing welcome. Amidst the chaos of sinking cargo, frozen limbs in water… a lifeboat arrives. Bring her up, the sailors lass! She’ll be a trophy for someone. Her upright arm is bent down into place, her torso bound with rope, captive.
Ascending from shore to land, past flint-lined chalk, up to the grassy flat of the downs, she notices the animals on this island are wearing the same white coats she has carried here, shorn and packed tight in bales on the Coonatto, her freshly wrecked ship, alongside thousands of copper ingots, kangaroo skin and bark. Coonatto, named after the hill station from which this wool most likely came. Coonatto, meaning ‘fruit-bearing tree’ in indigenous Australian, a tree which grew plentifully on the lands upon which that hill station imposed itself.
Settlers from this green island dreamed of infinite bounty, of Galleons turning golden with fleeces. Copper mines pregnant with profit were extracted from sacred soil. We found on arrival, they proclaimed, only unoccupied waste lands. All that followed was justified through terra nullius; their eyes did not acknowledge the bodies, dreams – and land – of a people, who, for tens of thousands of years, were already its close kin. First Nations Australians were classified as less than human. Sheep, perhaps, to be tended. Scripture was imported to this effect: The Lord is my Shepherd. Sheep and wheat became a proxy home from home, a totem of wool and blood, a means of occupation. They renamed the land that had always carried its own name and did not need a second. A bounty to those settlers became a disaster to these indigenous peoples, who watched as less than thirty imported sheep – Lice on our red land – turned into twenty-six million, trampling native plants, hardening the soft ground, disrupting the delicate ecological balance between human and earth. This major new industry deprived these Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of fertile land to move freely over and feed themselves. With their rights erased and forcibly colonised into unpaid, pastoral labour, they grew tired of threat and violence, of their children being stolen. In return, settler and police guns fired in unison, and indigenous massacres, dressed as ‘blood sports’, followed.
First one man, an elder, Vincent Lingiari, walked off across that red earth and calmly sat down, refusing to work the land for profit of the crown, sang a song From little things, big things grow. And they did - whole communities joined. Women sat peacefully under Coonatto, with the refrain, ‘We want to live on our land, our way’. To them, Australia is Country. Not just land, but the consciousness of the land, of which they are an eternal part, through paint, song and spirit.
After eight decades, a gesture, a palmful of sand poured back into the hands of this elder by the prime minister, marked the first return of territory. A back and forth of negociation, retraction and renegociation then and since, very slowly began a process of healing and reconciliation, and continues now.
This was their Anthropocene: colonisation-hastened climate breakdown through drought, desertification, unplanned fires and flash floods. It is the advice of the elders that is key to facing climate emergency in Country now, on how to return to policies that respect earth and its future. These elders’ Seven Sister’s Songlines under the Pleiades are mirrored back in name and across the sky along this coastline and through the portal of this wreck.
In Country, one Songline speaks of the sisters being pursued by a man in love or lust. They always outwit him, as they did at creation when they first ascended from earth into the sky to become these stars. Myriad versions of this story ripple across different territories; sometimes the sisters are turned into fire sticks through interactions with a trickster Crow, becoming the spark of creation itself. No division between outer and inner worlds, cultural story and present reality are one, dream tracks across their land.
It is said that these Sussex cliffs were named from the sea, not the sky, by sailors, seen as a row of nuns in habits. But their sky-bound namesake brings me richer poetic imaginings, connections and questions. How is the crumble of these Sisters in chalk seen by those stars above? And does the cliff, unlike the human eye, see, not just six or seven stars, but the hundreds beyond it, four hundred light years away and one hundred times brighter than the sun?
Under this Dark Skies Reserve, I have tried all week to focus in on the three-dimensional vision of this constellation, but I still only see this tableaux as flat, and am left frustrated. I try now again, and find Orion the Hunter, then, tracking top right, Aldebaran, the follower, or Bull’s Eye. Just beyond, off to the right, I see the sisters, Pleiades, the only star cluster who travel together, at the same speed. They are a tribe, and I begin to long for solidarity and company to explore this starry edge – and to walk and write in safety after the light fades.
And on the evening of this Spring Equinox, I return to the Sarsen Stone with six other women, all fellow writers with whom I am already journeying into literary landscapes. We tread slowly in the dark with head torches, some of us arm in arm. Golden light of Belle Tout just visible through charcoal haze. Blue edge-lines of the tapering cliff. We stand silently in the wind, watching the diamante caterpillar of a boat ahead. Our seven bodies sit upon these Seven Sisters cliffs, under the seven, multiplying into an infinite starscape.
Day and night are in equal balance now, as we sit sharing our trans-global knowledge of this star cluster, finding echoes and intersections between us. In the Bronze age, and to the Celts, the Seven Sisters are an icy castle, representing loss and remembrance of the dead. To many, still, they are said to help the heartbroken cope with sorrow. I feel the longing for my mother, softened in this company. She died at sea, her ashes cast here are part of the body and water of this coast now, and the reason I come here so often at peak of Spring, Equinox, our Persian new year, Nowruz, to connect with her.
She moves around the globe with us, first to Greece, where these stars are daughters of the god Atlas and sea-nymph, Pleione, and keep their father company in the sky as he holds up the earth. As these Seven Sisters rise, it is harvest time in the Global South, where they are welcomed with festival, sacred ceremony and celebration – a flock of birds announcing a new planting season, time to dig, a time of abundance; they can be disillusioned sisters casting off husbands and inspire tales of celestial pursuit and worship. In Maori, Matariki, mid-winter and marker of New Year. In Thailand they are chick-stars in a tale of sacrifice and love. In Samoan, they are the eyes of the chiefs; in Cherokee tradition they are lost children, and in many native American tribes used as a hunting calendar, with bison and buffaloes echoing the Taurus bull shape in the sky. And in Ukraine..in Ukraine they are a hundred embers, burning through war – yet still moving forward in hope.
We, seven women, create an orbit around Sarsen Stone with torch and phone light, take out pens, notepads. I feel the lightness of being in company here. So rare to inhabit these spaces and reclaim the rural night together. Fresh sentences, notes, fragments of poems are begun, as our eyes travel across the night sky and deep inside the earth, through chalk, rock and water. Stories where stars change gender, the prow of a ship comes alive and walks the Downs, where myths are rewritten. We shape this landscape through our eyes, to widen a lens on our shared past and foster future connection with this land.
As she often does at this time of year, my mother re-emerges from the sea as a flicker of moonlight on water. I remember now that she was named after a star of some kind. Brimming with the warm charge of these women’s company, I look up the translation of her name. My heart jumps. In Persian, my mother’s mother tongue, the name for this Seven Sisters star cluster is Parvin. My mother’s name. Further meanings "first, full, much, many ’. I smile. She was my first, my many. She was my home and became home to many others, offered refuge and welcome after the Iranian revolution’s mass exile, spoke out against oppression, stood for women, life and freedom.
As the bridge between these stars and the cliffs become my own creation story, I gaze upwards and, for the first time, I finally see it. In three dimensions. A pair of fierce eyes, a belt and legs in movement, a giant figure lunging towards a blue cluster of lights moving out of its reach. I am a small child again, gazing upwards, in wonder.
But as I gaze, I don’t see a man chasing daughters, women or nymphs.
Is this my mother being pursued by the figure of death as she disappeared into the waves, and onto the ghost path of the milky way? Is this figure the sea captain pursuing profit over safety, the Empire pursuing riches? Or is this perhaps an indigenous elder with their belt of wisdom seeking to reclaim sovereignty on their own land?
No, in my mind, these seven stars – and the hundreds beyond them – are people on the move, fleeing a giant, looming figure of war, triggered by sharpening climate crises, political oppression and injustice. And they are seeking safe haven here. Cuckmere Haven, Newhaven, Seahaven, Haven Brow. I gesture to welcome them back to earth.
I write in hope that our words written along this coastal edge will seed a Fruit-Bearing Tree, around which many more can find welcome, belonging, creative refuge and a balm for mind and body, amidst the chalk, water, earth. And with that thought, a verse of Omar Khayam, the astronomer and my mother’s favourite poet, surges forth from her star-dipped lips across the sky, illuminating these lines on the ground before me;
With them the seed of wisdom did I sow
And with my hand labored it to grow
And this was all the harvest that I reaped
I came like water
And like the wind I’ll go.
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To listen to this in the Seven Sisters landscape itself as part of the We Hear You Now audiowalk, download a map on the Seven Sisters project page here.
What 3 words location for the Listening Post here on a sheep gate below, a short walk up from the National Trust car park at Crowlink and along a circular coastal walk, details here.