"Flat Rock"

“Flat Rock”, named according to Smith tradition, is situated slightly N of W from the house and about 10 metres inside the western boundary of “Mt Horeb”. (When sitting on it, like I am now, one can see the green gable of the house). A monolith of roughly round shape, about 6 – 8 metres wide, this massive concretion of sandstone embedded with a broad range of smooth stones of varying sizes, sits proudly about 5 metres tall on the western face. Its unseen eastern extremities fade into the hillside allowing an easy climb onto its flat top.

From atop one has 180 degree view up the Paterson Valley with Mt. Lee and Mt Brecon in the centre. The village of Paterson nests quietly in the SW, tin roofs signal the habitations of those bare-skinned ones who, unlike wallabies and lizards and snakes, prefer a more structured home designed for creature-comforts that exclude nature-hewn crevasses and weather-beaten shelters encumbered with leaf-litter, dirt, chronic dampness and leeches. There thuds that sound of hammering, carried to me by the cooling breeze, and it tempts me to think another cottage is getting built on a site made barren by bulldozers that scrape away and discard the natural beauty so characteristically ignored by the modern age.

I love the green of the trees and moss, the pinks and taupes of the bush-rocks covered with lichen, the earthy ochres and musty yellows in the sandstone. And I love the negative shapes left by smooth stones fallen from the face of “Flat Rock”.

Long shadows of countless trees now stretch up the hillside, pointing toward home, their bark with its own shadowy form and texture tenuously clings to its mother. Those shadows also splash over four other flat rocks, one with a memorial to deceased family at its feet. There are other rocks, all in line standing gazing over the valley as they lay as a string of natural pearls on the mountain’s décolletage. “Flat Rock” in its own unique and abiding way is mother to them all.