Melinda J. Irvine

Knowing that the enormous tree holding your weight, and towering up and up and up into the sunlight, is more than 1000 years old can be a very humbling experience. You might even wish you weren’t so tight as to keep an iPhone 4 as your camera for nearly four years.

Walking into the forest and finding a place where the only human sounds I can hear are my own is something I have always enjoyed. And on Sunday when the bellbirds were so loud I could no longer hear my own footsteps, I remembered my dad in the 1970s taking an old tape recorder  into the hills and taping the birds so he could listen to them at home. He really did too, listen to them that is. Quite a lot.

That memory inspired me to use my old iPhone 4 and record the sound of the waterfall. If music is organised sound, than surely 3:15 of waterfall cascading past my human feet must be a song.

I’ll leave it for you to decide.

Song or not, just by listening, I’m sure you were there with me in the rainforest last Sunday afternoon where the only human sounds I could hear were my own.