Environmentalist and poet Dr Georgina Woods has written poetry her whole life.
Caught up with activism, campaigning and public interest advocacy as an adult, she's been thinking lately about poetry as an overlooked tool to help live with loss and environmental change.
"I don't think poetry alone will save the world, but I don't think the world will be saved without it," Woods says.
She has published her first book, The Tide Will Take It, with Newcastle publishing company Puncher and Wattmann.
"I really needed to speak to people about the things that were important to me through poetry rather than media releases and emails and the language of politics and news," Woods says.
"Poetry is more enduring and much deeper than that."
Woods has lived here all her life, exploring the beaches and the bushlands. The book is a collection of 36 poems on bodies of water, animals and women.
In her first poem, Acknowledgement of Country, she writes about the water of Gringai, Darkinjung, Gamilaraay and Wiradjuri Country descending to Awabakal Country through Wonnarua and Worimi Country.
"When the names are wrong
the story runs off over land
beaten under hoof and drags
the soil with it," she writes in a stanza.
"I do feel very connected to this place. It's a strange feeling. I am a trespasser. I'm not indigenous, my people come from Britain," Woods says.
But for her, the poem is as much about the water as the people. And she's taken the trouble to pay attention to it, which is evident in the poetry.
"Water comes here from the Barrington Plateau. There are amazing mountain swamps up there," she says.
"It also comes from out west, the Goulburn River, the southern end, the Wollombi Brook, also from underground, from the coal seam. There's water that rises up into the river."
Along with having a PhD in English literature, Woods spent 20 years working as a grassroots activist for organisations like Climate Action Network, Greenpeace and Lock The Gate.
In her book you'll find references to climate change, mining, greed and development, but also extensive literary references ranging from Ezra Pound to Dante, David Malouf, William Blake, Greek mythology and more.
She wonders if people will be interrupted when reading all her allusions to poets.
"My sister read it and she's not a poetry person. She said 'I had to Google a lot of things'," Woods says.
"There's a whole body of human and cultural experience behind us where people have grappled with the same things we grapple with now.
"Loss, confusion, yearning, love, meaning - poets from all over the world for millennia have been exploring this territory. To be able to draw on this heritage is so valuable.
"To be able to read The Odyssey and recognise concerns that I have now and impulses and dilemmas that I have now, it helps you understand yourself and your path."
When Woods writes about her natural surroundings, it all comes down to beauty.
"People talk about beauty as a declaration, but really it is the fundamental value of everything," she says.
"There's so much beauty in the natural world and in human beings, and I felt a great urge to connect and communicate about that."
She sees that people are very alienated from the world around them and she thinks poetry could be a great cultural communicator that the world desperately needs.
"I used to think we could deal with climate change by campaigning. I don't think that anymore. I think the crisis is really a much more psychological and cultural phenomenon that requires art as well as activism," Woods says.
She sees nature as a bridge between different ideologies, many of which are "of the moment" and quite superficial.
"There are other parts of us where we respond to the play of light on water or sudden arrival of a bird or feeling of surfing on a wave," she says.
"There's something much more fundamental: the impulse we have broken not knowing where our food comes from or where our waste goes, all of the problems we have because we have alienated ourselves from the world that creates us.
"You talk to people and you say 'I love looking at the moon at night. I love the ocean'. It's quite unusual to find someone who doesn't connect to those things."
She hopes everyone can connect to their own natural experiences through her words.
Women, too, are interwoven in her poems.
"It wasn't by design, specifically about the circumstances of women, it just happened," Woods says.
"I noticed I had written quite a number of poems about women's lives.
"A number of them are about specific women but saying something more far reaching."
Woods writes about women she knows personally and mythical women like Persephone.
Meeting Ezra at the Museum is a poem about American poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D). Woods is interested in Gaia, the primordial mythical goddess and ancestral mother of all life.
She referenced Gaia Theory or Hypothesis, which proposes that Earth itself is a self-regulating, complex system, which helps to maintain conditions for life on the planet.
The book has many paths and each poem offers a chance to appreciate, explore and ponder. Woods says ultimately these poems are about paying attention to the land we live on while we deal with the bureaucratic demands of making wages, paying rent, and even being on time.
"I want to know why the butcher birds make the special song in autumn versus spring," she says.
"When do the big tides come? I'd lived here all my life and not really, consciously understood those rhythms. Paying attention to it is a form of homage.
"We're going to lose a lot of it. It's changing already.
"It's a gift of homage to all the beauty that happens to be here as I am too."
