Amidst the struggle to come up with decent weekly content, the author decides to change the name of his blog. Once again.
The author, Andy Szollosi, sitting on a boulder. 2019, Pentax MX. Photograph taken by Tim Kirkby.
When I originally conceived the idea for this blog, I called it Mountains of Tasmania. This was in early 2020, and I proceeded to release a new post every Sunday morning. But after about a year, I discovered that a facebook group existed of the same name but had way more followers than my humble readership. So I changed the name to The Boiling Billy in February 2021. But when I discovered that a publisher existed in Australia with the same name, I felt obliged to change the title once again, to the name of my very first blog, which I started in Melbourne in the early 2010s and which never really took off. Scribbleton. A place where scribbles are not only accepted, they are the preferred form of currency. I was resurrecting an old ghost, one which I thought would give me a bit more freedom to explore new ideas.
And what I’ve realised recently is that perhaps the content of my blog since the last name change has lost its direction a little, and has been looking for a way to find itself again. And while I’ve been releasing new photographs with my posts each and every week, I’ve been digging hard to come up with words to go with every post. Scribbleton is a place for scribbles, and it removed the responsibility of writing anything particularly presentable.
Pencil pine on island. 2019 Pentax MX.
Recently, I was having a conversation with a friend, Pauly, whom I visited in Bright on my road trip from Noosa to Hobart. He told me that he really enjoyed the post titled ‘That’s the way the billy boils’, which I wrote about a year ago. It was a piece that talked about the shifting attitudes of bushwalkers in Tasmania, and around the world.
My conversation with Pauly made me want to change the name of the blog back to The Boiling Billy. But I knew I couldn’t. Once a name has been discarded, it can never be reinstated. But I liked the idea of a billy, because to me, it is a uniquely Australian reference to spending time in the bush.
A billy, is a small, lightweight pot that’s usually hung over the fire to heat water in. If we put water in it, and we manage not to spill it, we get boiling water. When the water boils, it is ready to use, to cook, to wash, to do whatever we may please with it. A boiling billy is one that’s achieved its purpose.
BW Panorama. 2020, Pentax MX.
But if we leave the billy over the fire for some time, and all the water boils away, and we still leave it over the fire, well that’s when we get a melting billy. This is the kind of billy we wish to never have. But it is a billy that gets a story told about it. A billy that’s melted is a billy that’s remembered. Well, at least for some time.
So this is a blog about trips out to the bush, to the wilderness, where not everything goes to plan and some kind of learning takes place. Trips that are worth remembering. The slow accumulation of wisdom prepares us better for our next visit to the bush. Next time we go out, we will watch as our water boils and we won’t let our billy run dry.
But a melting billy also represents a vessel in which different ingredients may be melted down and combined. It’s a mixing pot, where various ideas can encounter each other and interact. A melting billy is what we use to make a concoction, a potion, a remedy.
Welcome my dear readers, to The Melting Billy.
Tim Kirkby stands on the edge in the fading light over leawuleena. 2019 Pentax MX.
-A.S. 3/2/2023, Lenah Valley.