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Published: July 25th 2010
I do like Australia, I must say. No worries mate!
I’m buried in the far more sweaty climes of Darwin now, in the far North, as close to Asia as Oz gets. Thinking about it now, I should be going to PNG from here - it’s literally a short flight, or a lengthier boat ride away. So foolish to be doing what I’m actually going to do - flying from Brisbane to Phnom Phen -but it’s one thing to be a boat ride away from a place, another to be in the middle of a school year in Boston thinking about the far-off future. What seemed like a smart idea in March in Boston may not turn out to be quite so prescient in July. In fact, it may ultimately seem downright ridiculous, especially from the point of view of the flights I’m going to have to endure.
Of course, the converse to this ludicrousness could also be true: all my thinking about how to deal with the potential horrorshow of the next school year may be as far off the rationality mark as my summer planning was, but there’s no way around it, I am still waking up from sweaty
school-related stress dreams even now, as well as then spending a larger number of the early morning gloaming periods hopelessly thrashing wildly around for a way out from the impending utter travesty that’s going to be foisted on me in September. I am utterly dreading it. I know I shouldn’t be thinking about it at all - but it’s emerging like a cold cloud from the subconscious at 4:00am, a time of the day that renders almost any attempt to impose control, futile.
Antony and I spent Sunday going out to the Bush to the site of a defunct goldmine a strange little town called Charters Towers. The place was typically Sunday quiet, but we found another whopping great deeply unhealthy and delicious British/Australian/American breakfast. After gorging like a pair of giant hogs, we wandered the streets once more searching for sights to digitally capture for posterity. We drove on towards the site of the goldmine where we found a country fair in progress, a military band playing swing music, fronted by a blisteringly powerful sax player and a jazzy rnb singer: Khakis, John Coltrane, and Aretha. If that wasn’t strange enough, then you should have seen the crowd; a
more unseemly and oddball cast of mutants rarely seen outside episodes of the Simpsons. After a brief wander around the Goldmine shed where large conveyor belted machines rumbled and shook the buildings, after wandering past what would be, in most countries, environmental hazardous wastelands, but which are tourist attractions and photo-worthy in this incredibly young country: if you thought America was a historically shallow little pond, then Oz is barely a bird bath puddle, we took our leave of Charters Towers. We had dutifully snapped pictures of the ‘Cyanide pits’ where gold was separated from its slurrilous sludge; we had taken pictures of the rusting hulks of ancient machines - Cars from the 1930’s. We had snapped up a few pictures of the incongruous band blasting through militaristic versions of Motown classics. Tourist duty done!
We drove away to find an off-track route back to Townsville, bouncing along red dirt tracks through a military range brimming with warnings to the Hervey (pronounced, ‘Harvey’) Range where we stuffed down rubbish scones and cream cheese before steeply descending back to the coast, then on into Townsville. Here’s something I don’t get about these Oz military people: As I write, it’s a few
days later, and I’ve just been around Kakadu National Park, as I will soon describe, where just yesterday we passed through another military training area, this one replete not only with red dust corrugated tracks but also with dozens of camouflaged tanks. This continent contains about ten zillion hectares of empty desert, the sort of places where you could drop a few nukes and not even be able to tell that anything had happened. These boys could whizz off into these lost and dusty wastelands and blow up shit to their hearts content: Why do they have to set up their training grounds right on the edge of beauty spots like The Hervey Range and Kakadu National Park? Are they afraid that everyone will ignore them if they disappear into the vast wilderness of Oz, so, like insecure bullies; they have to blow up all the pretty and fragile places to make themselves feel tough? When we drove through the zone, fully expecting to hear the whistle and drone of an incoming shell, that trickle of worry that marginally prickled our minds, that slight imperceptible possibility, as we read the terrible warnings about lasers and God knows what else blasting
us to Kingdom Come along with the crocodiles and Kangas: that stuff may be the very sort of gnarly soul sucking foodstuff on which the bastards feed!
I spent Monday getting my proverbial ducks in a row: getting my refund for the boat trip that never was, washing and packing, watching the highly applauded Ozzie gangster movie ‘Animal Kingdom’ at the movies ( I know this isn’t exactly a duck that needed lining up, but, at least it has an animal in the title), then finally getting whisked to the airport by Antony, out of work early after the lates exploding pipe fiasco at his job for which he retains an amused attitude, even though it seems like a pretty serious turn of events to me. I guess, as long as they keep delivering paychecks, it’s all good! The plane rides to Darwin went off without incident and the clocks slid one half of an hour one way or the other upon arrival, the temperature and humidity rose to a sticky and dense place, and suddenly I’m in my bare slightly hovelish room at Elke’s backpacker, with the AC roaring efficiently like a cold fireplace around which I could crouch
for life affirming coolness. I went for a late night walk to scope out the scene along the main street, Mitchell street, a walk I was destined to repeat the next day, adding in another Esplanade walk for good measure, another hearty (as in, bad for the heart) breakfast before deciding to rent a bike for the day. The rest of the day I spent trundling around Darwin on the mountain bike I rented: I covered a pretty substantial amount of the City: From the tasteful parks and lakes and Wallabies of East Point, to The Wharf area downtown where a wave machine swimming pool and a wharf bedecked with fish and chip joints, along with the slumbering masses sun worshipping…
Gotta go…
More later…
See you on the flypaper….
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vicki
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...here's to better dreams...