More Bushranger Bay shots for Treasure Tuesday

 

This post continues from Sunday, returning again to Bushrangers Bay at Cape Schanck—a landscape that asks for effort before it gives anything back. The walk itself was a reckoning for our sedentary bodies, every step a reminder of distance, weight, and time. The tide was high, erasing the intricate language of the exposed sea floor, denying us those fleeting revelations of rock pools and marine scars. At high tide the coast becomes uncompromising: corners cannot be navigated, passages close without apology, and the land reminds you that access is always conditional.

From there, the drive inland told a far more unsettling story. Melbourne to Bendigo, through Ravenswood—now spoken of in the past tense after a major bushfire tore through. Natimuk, near Horsham, an old town where I once visited nursing homes, burnt down as if memory itself were expendable. Longwood near Shepparton followed, acres reduced to ash. It felt less like isolated disasters and more like a state collectively alight, one ignition bleeding into the next.

And hovering over it all is the hollow ritual of government response: the loud, performative cry of “total fire ban,” repeated like a broken clock striking the wrong hour. While slogans echo, services are cut. Fire response capacity is thinned. Farmers are left to defend their land, their stock, their homes—often alone—despite paying special fire levies meant to ensure protection. Responsibility is devolved without consent, risk privatized, and accountability dissolved into press conferences.

What burns most fiercely here is not only bush or town, but trust. A government that substitutes warnings for action, bans for preparedness, and rhetoric for resourcing is not governing risk—it is outsourcing survival. And the cost is written plainly across the landscape, in blackened paddocks, erased towns, and the quiet exhaustion of people who were told help existed, only to discover it had been cancelled.

Sony A7RV

FE 20-70mm f4 G

Linking Treasure Tuesday

Bushrangers Bay Cape Schanck for Sunday Best

 

Bushrangers Bay is one of the new frontiers we have set for ourselves in 2026, a place that demands both patience and return. Reaching it requires a deliberate walk—close to fifty minutes along a largely flat coastal trail that slowly eases you away from the ordinary world. With each step, the signal fades completely; reception disappears, and with it the low hum of obligations. What remains is distance, time, and anticipation.

The path itself offers little drama, yet this restraint sharpens the senses. Low coastal scrub leans into the track, shaped by years of salt and wind, and the ground carries a quiet firmness underfoot, as if it has learned endurance. The bay does not announce itself early. It waits. Only near the end does the sound of the sea begin to overtake your thoughts, a deeper, more insistent rhythm than anything the city can produce.

Bushrangers Bay opens abruptly, raw and uncompromising. The water sits heavy and dark against pale rock, the shoreline carved with geological patience. Wind moves through the cove without apology, pressing hard against the body and pulling heat from the skin even as the sun bears down relentlessly. On our first visit, the air was thick with heat, yet the wind never relented—an exhausting, elemental contradiction that left no room for comfort.

This is not a place for quick work or casual visits. The bay reveals itself slowly, changing with light and tide. We already know we will return several times, particularly for the long, slanting hours of golden light, when the cliffs soften, the water begins to glow, and the severity of the landscape briefly turns generous. In those moments, the bay feels less like a destination and more like a conversation—one that cannot be rushed, and that insists on being met again and again, on its own terms.

Sony A7RV

FE 20-70mm f4 G

Linking Sunday Best