I’ve answered my mail, done my laundry and hung up the swag. Last night I even slept in my own bed. It’s official, I’m back in the real world, though it took a week or so to admit it.
Krust and I left Alice almost a month ago to drive to Broome on the Tanami track, a thousand kilometres of red dirt masquerading as a road. There’s nothing much on it except a few ruined stations, about thirty rusty vehicle carcasses, and a solitary roadhouse with the picturesque name of Rabbit Flat. After a day or so the landscape of spinifex, red dirt, and termite mounds got a little repetitive, but it’s beautiful country. I was even allowed to drive a little way, which was fun if excruciatingly slow. Nothing went wrong with the car except that it made some suspicious noises and the numberplate almost fell off. Met a man at Rabbit Flat who had a wheel fall off. When asked how this happened, he replied "never let your wife change a tyre."
I missed the ocean so much I ran straight in with most of my clothes on and felt like I could swim to India.
Broome is a weird town with new developments muscled in over everything so that you can hardly tell it used to be a seedy bordello/opium den kinda place. There are so many resorts and caravan parks that you wonder how many people actually live there. I can understand it, because it’s a damned beautiful part of the world with no trace of winter in the air, wide white beaches and the desert pressing against the sea. And hell, I was holidaying there too.
Outside Coles, a man from Darwin came and sat with us. He told us about losing his daughter in Cyclone Tracy. We made sympathetic noises. He proceeded to sing Santa Never Made it Into Darwin. The whole damn thing. I guess it was a nice change from the high rotation maiden we were thrashing in the car.
At the surf club, a little girl turned to me as the sun was dropping over the horizon. She said “You know what degrees it feels like to me?” I shook my head. She leaned over and solemnly declared, “ONE.” I guess winter is relative. We talked about polar bears for a while. The kid knew a lot about them.
We picked up a couple of mates from the airport and proceeded to lie on the astonishingly beautiful beaches north of Broome and do very little except eat and drink and read and swim. We did a couple of Broome things, like go to Sun Pictures to see some local docos, one of which was about the Beagle Bay Mission and the cute nuns. We drank the local microbrewery’s ginger beer (mine’s better). We tried to find a pub that was showing the world cup final, to no avail. Football who? Finally we ended up in a motel room trying to stay awake through the epic of watching extra time and penalties on a blurry telly. I hope come 2010 I’m somewhere that cares.
Feeling like an explore, we went up to Beagle Bay to visit the church with the pearl shell altar and continued to One Arm Point to camp on the estuary and snorkel and fish and sit under a tree in the rain and give up and drink wine in the car. By this stage I had read both the books I brought with me and was working my way through Krust’s work-related stash of teenage fiction. Lord of the Flies almost destroyed my desire to be marooned on an island for the rest of my days.
Leaving Marni at the airport, three of us drove up to Derby and camped in the mudflats, which had great vacant acoustics which was good for fiddle - and for hearing the entire length of the mammoth party going on in the suburbs half a mile away. Talk, shout, sing, fight, talk, cry, all night long. In the morning I had a driving lesson thinking there was nothing out there to run into, and managed to bog the car in a stream of wet mud. A nice local fella towed us out and link (the dog) spent an afternoon despondently licking off his mudshoes.
Drove back along the Gibb River Rd through the Kimberly and visited some gorges and swam some more and drank some more and ate some more. Saw some freshwater crocs, but no salties. Blew two tyres at once on the rough gravel road and on fixing them discovered we were about 500 metres from the tarmac of the highway home. Which was pretty good timing, really, considering nothing else went wrong.
Got into Katherine (and mobile reception) to the news that we are gonna be evicted from the ranch sometime later this year. Shit. I was already wondering what I’m doing in Alice when I could be lying on a beach somewhere. I’m still not sure why I’m here. I’ve been hoping that a good reason will materialise from somewhere. I don’t want my room and my porch and my garden fed to a goddamn bulldozer. Same old shit.
We stopped to visit a friend in Tennant Creek. There is a fake lake in Tennant Creek. It’s bizarre. Camping in her backyard was like transitional housing (I told her she should apply for SAAP funding) but when we got back to Alice on Saturday night I was still having trouble landing. I was deeply disturbed by the existence of walls. Fortunately I had visitors and went off camping again. I can now rest happily in the knowledge that I have fulfilled a long-held ambition to climb King’s Canyon in a frock.
So I finally said goodbye to my visitors and hitched up from the Yulara turnoff with a little old man in a motorhome. I asked him if he was travelling alone.
“My wife passed away,” he said, “we always planned to do this together when she retired, but she got breast cancer instead.”
“I’m sure she’s with you in spirit,” I offered.
“Oh, I’ve got her ashes in the back,” he replied. “We have some great conversations.”
It’s strange to go on holiday for a month and come back. It’s long enough to get used to the rhythm of the road, of making camp and rolling out the swag. I want to keep traveling, of course, to slip back into that lifestyle. Coming home to an insecure house made me wonder whether living here is such a great idea. But one step into the bush and I know I still love it. I can ignore the earthmover digging a hole in my backyard. And I do have a book to write, which is an anchor.
The good news is that I’ve come back to a few happy publishing adventures, including a book of Territory writers into which I’ve snuck despite being a blow-in. I’ve rested Grace for a month and I’m looking forward to getting back to it once I’ve done my other homework. As for No-Legs, he’s still on my desk in a state of almost-finished. I’ll get around to him soon, I promise.
If you want to see photos of the trip, I’ve jumped on the flickr bandwagon: www.flickr.com/photos/jenjencam
Krust and I left Alice almost a month ago to drive to Broome on the Tanami track, a thousand kilometres of red dirt masquerading as a road. There’s nothing much on it except a few ruined stations, about thirty rusty vehicle carcasses, and a solitary roadhouse with the picturesque name of Rabbit Flat. After a day or so the landscape of spinifex, red dirt, and termite mounds got a little repetitive, but it’s beautiful country. I was even allowed to drive a little way, which was fun if excruciatingly slow. Nothing went wrong with the car except that it made some suspicious noises and the numberplate almost fell off. Met a man at Rabbit Flat who had a wheel fall off. When asked how this happened, he replied "never let your wife change a tyre."
I missed the ocean so much I ran straight in with most of my clothes on and felt like I could swim to India.
Broome is a weird town with new developments muscled in over everything so that you can hardly tell it used to be a seedy bordello/opium den kinda place. There are so many resorts and caravan parks that you wonder how many people actually live there. I can understand it, because it’s a damned beautiful part of the world with no trace of winter in the air, wide white beaches and the desert pressing against the sea. And hell, I was holidaying there too.
Outside Coles, a man from Darwin came and sat with us. He told us about losing his daughter in Cyclone Tracy. We made sympathetic noises. He proceeded to sing Santa Never Made it Into Darwin. The whole damn thing. I guess it was a nice change from the high rotation maiden we were thrashing in the car.
At the surf club, a little girl turned to me as the sun was dropping over the horizon. She said “You know what degrees it feels like to me?” I shook my head. She leaned over and solemnly declared, “ONE.” I guess winter is relative. We talked about polar bears for a while. The kid knew a lot about them.
We picked up a couple of mates from the airport and proceeded to lie on the astonishingly beautiful beaches north of Broome and do very little except eat and drink and read and swim. We did a couple of Broome things, like go to Sun Pictures to see some local docos, one of which was about the Beagle Bay Mission and the cute nuns. We drank the local microbrewery’s ginger beer (mine’s better). We tried to find a pub that was showing the world cup final, to no avail. Football who? Finally we ended up in a motel room trying to stay awake through the epic of watching extra time and penalties on a blurry telly. I hope come 2010 I’m somewhere that cares.
Feeling like an explore, we went up to Beagle Bay to visit the church with the pearl shell altar and continued to One Arm Point to camp on the estuary and snorkel and fish and sit under a tree in the rain and give up and drink wine in the car. By this stage I had read both the books I brought with me and was working my way through Krust’s work-related stash of teenage fiction. Lord of the Flies almost destroyed my desire to be marooned on an island for the rest of my days.
Leaving Marni at the airport, three of us drove up to Derby and camped in the mudflats, which had great vacant acoustics which was good for fiddle - and for hearing the entire length of the mammoth party going on in the suburbs half a mile away. Talk, shout, sing, fight, talk, cry, all night long. In the morning I had a driving lesson thinking there was nothing out there to run into, and managed to bog the car in a stream of wet mud. A nice local fella towed us out and link (the dog) spent an afternoon despondently licking off his mudshoes.
Drove back along the Gibb River Rd through the Kimberly and visited some gorges and swam some more and drank some more and ate some more. Saw some freshwater crocs, but no salties. Blew two tyres at once on the rough gravel road and on fixing them discovered we were about 500 metres from the tarmac of the highway home. Which was pretty good timing, really, considering nothing else went wrong.
Got into Katherine (and mobile reception) to the news that we are gonna be evicted from the ranch sometime later this year. Shit. I was already wondering what I’m doing in Alice when I could be lying on a beach somewhere. I’m still not sure why I’m here. I’ve been hoping that a good reason will materialise from somewhere. I don’t want my room and my porch and my garden fed to a goddamn bulldozer. Same old shit.
We stopped to visit a friend in Tennant Creek. There is a fake lake in Tennant Creek. It’s bizarre. Camping in her backyard was like transitional housing (I told her she should apply for SAAP funding) but when we got back to Alice on Saturday night I was still having trouble landing. I was deeply disturbed by the existence of walls. Fortunately I had visitors and went off camping again. I can now rest happily in the knowledge that I have fulfilled a long-held ambition to climb King’s Canyon in a frock.
So I finally said goodbye to my visitors and hitched up from the Yulara turnoff with a little old man in a motorhome. I asked him if he was travelling alone.
“My wife passed away,” he said, “we always planned to do this together when she retired, but she got breast cancer instead.”
“I’m sure she’s with you in spirit,” I offered.
“Oh, I’ve got her ashes in the back,” he replied. “We have some great conversations.”
It’s strange to go on holiday for a month and come back. It’s long enough to get used to the rhythm of the road, of making camp and rolling out the swag. I want to keep traveling, of course, to slip back into that lifestyle. Coming home to an insecure house made me wonder whether living here is such a great idea. But one step into the bush and I know I still love it. I can ignore the earthmover digging a hole in my backyard. And I do have a book to write, which is an anchor.
The good news is that I’ve come back to a few happy publishing adventures, including a book of Territory writers into which I’ve snuck despite being a blow-in. I’ve rested Grace for a month and I’m looking forward to getting back to it once I’ve done my other homework. As for No-Legs, he’s still on my desk in a state of almost-finished. I’ll get around to him soon, I promise.
If you want to see photos of the trip, I’ve jumped on the flickr bandwagon: www.flickr.com/photos/jenjencam
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1 Comments:
Apologies to Laurie indeed ... I think I know the reference in the title. jxo
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