In the 1920s, at the same time as the gravel pits at Gherang were beginning to prosper (they even had their own railway siding back then), there was a jarosite mine just a few miles further south towards the ocean, in the ironbark basin between Bells Beach and Point Addis. As I approached the roadworks, I was driving right between the still working gravel pits and the redundant site of the jarosite mine. ‘The old paint mine’, as it is sometimes called locally, was an ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful venture started by a geologist and weekend prospector named George Affleck, who, when scouting around the beach at Point Addis one day, noticed jarosite-rich beds up to three metres thick in the cliffs. After a little bit more investigation, and figuring there was a buck to be made from mining the cliffs for the manufacture of a red oxide based paint, he teamed up with a financier and a chemist, took a crown lease of over 200 acres of the ironbark basin abutting the coast, and for a time sold the pigment to the Victorian Railways who used it to paint their once famous ‘red rattler’ trains. So before our intricate and largely forgotten local Otway railway network was decommissioned to make way for the independence and convenience of motor cars and trucks, the small trains that would wend their way along the saddle of Moriac, Layard, Gherang, Wormbete and Wensleydale, were painted in predominantly endemic tones.

Affleck’s jarosite mine came to an abrupt close as the Great Depression kicked in but what is interesting is how he had attempted to capitalise on the quality of the ground that had been so prized by aboriginal people for millennia. Notwithstanding the economic downturn of the Depression, and the critical lack of freshwater on the site of his mine, the term he used to describe the mineral he wanted to cash in on – jarosite – can perhaps give us a clue as to a deeper reason for why his venture was ultimately unsustainable. What interests me is how this geological term itself fails to do justice to the local material it names, very much the same material that was exposed amongst the hi-viz and machinery as I drove by on that otherwise nondescript day.

A dictionary in common use in George Affleck’s day, the Century Dictionary, defines jarosite as ‘a native hydrous sulphate of iron and potassium, occurring in ochre-yellow rhombohedral crystals, and also in granular masses’. It’s interesting though that the rather generic suffix of the word – ‘ite’ – often serves to transfom a noun into an adjective in order to denote some kind of connection or belonging to a place or thing, as in Israelite or Carmelite. In the case of jarosite, the suffix turns out to connect the mineral to a specific area in Almerian Spain, the Barranco del Jaroso. So jarosite, the word, is of the Barranco del Jaroso, on the shores of the western Mediterranean, which perhaps explains the curious inclusion of the word ‘native’ in the Century definition. Native to where, precisely? Well, once upon a time, to the Barranco del Jaroso. It goes without saying then that jarosite is certainly not a precise, let alone an autochthonous, descriptor for the endemic brightness of our local ground here on the edge of the Eastern Otways in southern Australia.

For millennia before the word jarosite was ever uttered on these shores, the pigments of the littoral had been ritually used by the Wadawurrung and their neighbours on Country, up Country and beyond. It had been traded along ancient routes as far north as the Murray River, and probably further. I’ve spoken to knowledgeable elders from the Wadawurrung, and I’ve combed the tragically fragmented archives of the remnant language of the region in search of the original word, or words, for the pigment. I’ve also run through the exotic names of the European paintbox, in search of the right term. Burnt sienna and raw umber, these are two that come to mind straight off the top, which, once again, takes us to other faraway geographies: ‘sienna’ coming from the Italian terri di Sienna, or ‘earth of Siena’, and umber from terra di ombra, ‘earth of shadow’, with its topographic implication of ‘earth of Umbria’.

So it’s frustrating. There would once have been exact local words for this vivid earth I’ve been walking on and dreaming about all my life. Back when my ancestors arrived in the area from Ireland and Sicily in 1841 it was treasured by the Wadawurrung as a currency of significance beyond the value of diamonds.

For the time being however, and with much Wadawurrung language reconstruction continuing apace, we can’t be exactly sure what the right term is. There’s a word collected by the early colonial Assistant Protector of Aborigines, William Thomas, in the vicinity of Bacchus Marsh in the 1840s: ‘nyooroo nyooroo’, meaning ochre or paint. And there’s ‘paapool’, or ‘paapul’, meaning chalk, or mud, or pipeclay, also collected by Thomas in the Melbourne area, denoting a lighter coloured hue. But what was the term here amongst the Turaltja clan of the southwestern Wadawurrung littoral? Through talking to local artists who use this local dirt for renders and pigments I know that, like anything of substantial beauty, the colour I am thinking about is not just one thing, or in this case one tint, hue or tone. From the Gherang gravel pits on the north side of the Great Ocean Road to the jarosite beds between Bells Beach and Point Addis on the south, there is a range of earths that make up this complex local brightness. Amongst the ochrey tones, for instance, there is the substance known as kaolin, or china clay, a pale talc-like material whose elastic properties are useful for anything from the making of cosmetics and porcelain to the sealing of farm dams. The word ‘kaolin’ comes from the Jiangxi province of China, a region famous for its porcelain. My brother, an artist who often works with the local clays and pigments, shows me how when you hold this kaolin in your fingers you can’t help but notice its beautiful pliability, its feather-like softness, and the smoothing effect it has on the skin. You also can’t help but be fascinated with the way it mixes with and marbles the ochre tones around it. When the Gherang gravel is first laid out on the roads it has a deep and rich reddishness which over time fades towards the pale tones of the kaolin (or perhaps ‘Jiangxi-ite’!) it lives with. They are quite literally bedfellows, perhaps nyooroo nyooroo and paapool side by side. Therein lies our locally specific spectrum. This is variegated earth we are talking about, hybrid ground, as complex and rhythmically integrated as the rituals of the Wadawurrung in which I understand the pigments played a central part.