Map of Australia

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Yuendumu is a place where I once watched a football match in the fading light of the desert. Oblivious to a half inhabited red planet some would call dirty, I stood and cast a long shadow over everything. A road map of Australia can exceed the title of basic and still show nothing of Yuendumu. Gone are the lifeless veins that follow the east coast; Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, clotting to a varicose heel in the state of Victoria. I flew into Melbourne for a long weekend of coffee and reflection, watching through plate glass a city comforted by the coffee bean. A chef on a fag break; the sky blue boot of a low convertible. I cloaked myself in newspapers. There was a basic map of Australia on one of the pages. I finger-traced the void north west of Alice Springs, reduced to the size of a postage stamp. The Ghan and the India-Pacific run like two stitches: Darwin to Adelaide, Sydney to Perth. They intersect at Port Augusta: a place of great romantic excitement in my mind.

The tea and sugar train used to run from Port Augusta to Kalgoorlie, servicing remote communities across the Nullabor Plain. A little Queenslander called Alex was under the impression it was still going. Go to the freight terminal in Augusta, he said; tell them you want to take the tea and sugar train to Kalgoorlie via Cook. You have a job at the general store in Cook, but you haven’t received your finalisation yet. Ask to pay up front. At Cook, the train will stop for fifteen minuets. Take your passport and money, leave your backpack, {added a comma} and run to the general store to buy a ticket to Kalgoorlie. Alex rode the train in his youth, in an age before his happy wrinkles. The gum-booted, beer-stained passengers bought music and sacks of dried food. Communal water butts were passed up with a swing and shove method. I have watched men unload a similar truckload of water, each butt temporarily pushed into the shade of a corrugated iron awning. The water bounced and slapped in the sunlight. Red circles were pressed into the ground at the drop off point.

Alex dictates the instructions and draws me an inky map- for his own pleasure more than my interest. It is a modest diamond, detailed only at his home territory. Each dent of Cape York is drawn with a confident pen line. Victoria is still an unglamorous heel; Western Australia is suddenly an oversized foot, and the tea and sugar train is reborn as Alex remembers the route. I tell him about my time in Yuendumu, and he nods with the colourful memory of similar communities. Each dot on the rail line is a community; Yumbarra, Ooldea, Nundroo, Koonalda, Mundrabilla, Cocklebiddy; and then we reach Kalgoorlie, and Alex is happy because he has seen the Nullabor Plain again.

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