Betka is one of those places you can visit a hundred times and still not be quite sure what you are going to find. The river, sand and sea are forever negotiating with each other, sometimes quietly over months and sometimes dramatically in the space of a day.
This August gave us a particularly good example. I flew the drone over Betka on 19/08/2026, while the river was still closed to the sea, then returned on 22/08/2026 to find a fresh channel cut through the beach and the dark river water running out into the Tasman Sea.
Those two flights ended up producing two quite different songs.
Where the Betka Meets the Sea
The first film was made while Betka was still closed after winter. From above, the river sat dark and still behind the pale strip of sand, with the coastal Banksias and heath running back into the bush and the open sea just beyond it.
That flight became Where the Betka Meets the Sea, a slower, reflective song about rivers eventually finding their way. At the time I wrote it, the river hadn't actually broken through. It was still waiting behind the beach.
The chorus became:
Where the Betka meets the sea
Where the dark runs into blue
Where the things we've carried inland
Finally come breaking through
There was something slightly prophetic about that line, because only a few days later that was exactly what happened.
Watch: Where the Betka Meets the Sea
Then Betka Changed
Sometime between my flight on the 19th and my return on the 22nd, the sandbar gave way. I don't know the exact hour it happened, but by the time I was back over the beach there was no mistaking it.
A fresh channel was running through what had been dry sand only days earlier. Tea-coloured river water was streaming towards the sea, new sandbars were forming around the mouth, and the shape of Betka Beach had been redrawn yet again.
Seen from the ground, it was a new opening in the beach. Seen from the drone, you could follow the whole thing, from the river winding through the coastal bush to the channel cutting across the sand and finally reaching the ocean.
Betka Turns Again
That second flight needed a different song. Rather than another reflective ballad, I wanted something that sounded more like people who actually knew the place talking about it.
Betka Turns Again became an Australian Celtic-style duet, with a baritenor male lead and strong mezzo female voice answering him. Fiddle, bodhrán, acoustic guitar and whistle give it more movement, while the lyrics bring in some of the things that make Betka feel like Betka: Banksias, black cockatoos, pelicans, oystercatchers, sea eagles and, inevitably, somebody flying a drone.
One exchange probably sums up the river better than anything else in the song:
You make her sound like an old woman
Maybe she is
Stubborn as anything
You'd know about that
And later:
There's a bloke with a drone above us
Wonder who that could be
Trying to catch one little morning
Before it runs away to sea
That is pretty much what these films are. An attempt to catch one version of Betka before it becomes another one.
Watch: Betka Turns Again
Listen on Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/album/33TaDB7ddYoNQERARJk81K?si=V_0O1Qz2R3K5LyHnLDytLw
Three Days Apart
What I like most about putting the two films together is that neither is the "correct" Betka. The closed river on the 19th was Betka, and the open river on the 22nd was Betka too.
We tend to think of landscapes as permanent things and changes as events that happen to them. Betka is a good reminder that the change is part of the landscape.
The sand moves. The river rises and falls. The entrance closes, opens somewhere slightly different, widens, narrows and eventually closes again. Birds move along the shoreline, Banksias bend in the winter wind, and the next tide begins rearranging what the last one left behind.
You can photograph it, film it, fly over it and even write songs about it, but you cannot make it stay the same.
As the second song puts it:
That's the thing about this coastline
Never quite the same
And that's probably why we love it
Betka turns again.
