today is the summer solstice. time to stand in the place you watch your sunsets and mark where the ol' ball falls, cause he's swinging back north tomorrow. i've had my eye on that horizon for a while - it's still looking good.
hitching the great ocean road on no sleep in antarctic drizzle was interesting. it took a day and a half of so many short hops i lost count. my favourite ride was probably the country single mums out for a barbie 'with some bloody shearers' in a horrible falling-apart yellow ford station wagon. they took my photo to prove i existed. i should have asked for a copy, cause at that stage i was beginning to wonder.
i slept in a barn somewhere in south australia. it was less romantic than it sounds - attached to a rural high school, empty and freezing cold. i burrowed into the sawdust and thought of the desert sun. when i got to adelaide i was just in time to catch the twice-weekly passenger train, which was on special, so i caved. it felt good to sail in on tracks, with a set time of arrival and a temperature-controlled sleeping place. i like the people on planet ghan, but i object to their voiceover which claims the NT was a vast 'empty' land before whitefellas came. i got huffity about it, but the indigenous women i was chatting to seemed way less bothered. it's such a luxury to be shocked by racism.
speaking of racists, i'm back in alice springs. land of whinging about people who sleep in the river. land of shutting down the homegrown recycling centre, the bowerbird tip shop, which has been given its marching orders by a greedy out-of-touch council, sold to some corporate mob from Queensland. this shit makes me mad. where else will i be asked to put a recording of a short story in a rewired 50s hair dryer as part of an audio installation? how else are we supposed to furnish our houses, our crafts, our lives? it seems like anything that embraces what i think of as the outback spirit, the eccentric resourcefulness, gets quickly squashed in favour of packaged touristy crap. i don't want to live in a plastic snowdome!
despite the disappointing aspects of town it feels good to be here this time of year. people seem to appreciate each other more. the usual chit-chat in the post office queue or the health food shop winds out into country time. the pressure's off, and this might surprise those of you who live elsewhere, but it can be a very high-acheiving, workaholic place.
what am i doing here? housesitting and befriending the resident blue heeler. swimming. enjoying the thunderstorms and the cool change that came in overnight. attempting to work on the new book... really. hosting christmas day shenanigans, which you're welcome to attend. and marking the horizon, taking aim, planning my next escape. not long now!
hitching the great ocean road on no sleep in antarctic drizzle was interesting. it took a day and a half of so many short hops i lost count. my favourite ride was probably the country single mums out for a barbie 'with some bloody shearers' in a horrible falling-apart yellow ford station wagon. they took my photo to prove i existed. i should have asked for a copy, cause at that stage i was beginning to wonder.
i slept in a barn somewhere in south australia. it was less romantic than it sounds - attached to a rural high school, empty and freezing cold. i burrowed into the sawdust and thought of the desert sun. when i got to adelaide i was just in time to catch the twice-weekly passenger train, which was on special, so i caved. it felt good to sail in on tracks, with a set time of arrival and a temperature-controlled sleeping place. i like the people on planet ghan, but i object to their voiceover which claims the NT was a vast 'empty' land before whitefellas came. i got huffity about it, but the indigenous women i was chatting to seemed way less bothered. it's such a luxury to be shocked by racism.
speaking of racists, i'm back in alice springs. land of whinging about people who sleep in the river. land of shutting down the homegrown recycling centre, the bowerbird tip shop, which has been given its marching orders by a greedy out-of-touch council, sold to some corporate mob from Queensland. this shit makes me mad. where else will i be asked to put a recording of a short story in a rewired 50s hair dryer as part of an audio installation? how else are we supposed to furnish our houses, our crafts, our lives? it seems like anything that embraces what i think of as the outback spirit, the eccentric resourcefulness, gets quickly squashed in favour of packaged touristy crap. i don't want to live in a plastic snowdome!
despite the disappointing aspects of town it feels good to be here this time of year. people seem to appreciate each other more. the usual chit-chat in the post office queue or the health food shop winds out into country time. the pressure's off, and this might surprise those of you who live elsewhere, but it can be a very high-acheiving, workaholic place.
what am i doing here? housesitting and befriending the resident blue heeler. swimming. enjoying the thunderstorms and the cool change that came in overnight. attempting to work on the new book... really. hosting christmas day shenanigans, which you're welcome to attend. and marking the horizon, taking aim, planning my next escape. not long now!
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