Lightning Trip to Sydney and back February 2008

WARNING

If you are offended by sexual inuendo there is a sentence in this post that will be problematic for you.

Going down on the highway
On Saturday (9/2/08) I drove to Sydney to collect John’s piece from the Graduate Exhibition (mentioned in last month’s Bull tin). I left at 6:00 am and arrived at Blackheath in the Blue Mountains at 6:00 pm, where I stayed at my friend Penny’s place overnight; then drove down to Gomorrah at 6:45 am on Sunday, had breakfast in Glebe and collected the art work at 10:30 am and headed back to Mullumbimby, arriving at 11:45 pm. Are you exhausted already just reading about it? Well let me tell you, I hope John has many more pieces to deliver to Sydney, (though not to collect, for the point of any further deliveries would be to sell them) because I’ll be there to do the job. You see, I just happen to love driving. I really should have been a truckie.

What I love about long distance driving is the freedom to wander in one’s mind’s body through the landscape one is traversing to the accompaniment of fine music – and on this occasion to the riveting voice of a reader “singing” Finnegan’s Wake. I say singing, even though he was reading, because the story, even though it is a work of prose, can only be described as a song – an EPIC song! More about that in another blog post. It also gave me the opportunity to do a bit of singing myself. I included among the discs I took the recording of last year’s concert, to which I sang along delighting in the fact that I could sing the whole thing from memory, without the score to keep me from straying from the tenor part. I also took a disc of Teddy Tahu Rhodes (a bass/baritone) and hummed and harred my way through that as well, realising that that there was not a single bass note on the disc that I could not reach – which gave me the bright idea of collecting a few baritone pieces for my repertoire. Not that I could ever sound like TTR, I hasten to say. At some point the hilarious thought occurred to me that a singing truckie might attract the nick-name “Bullocky”. So from now on I will answer to “Bull”, being already an accomplisher bull artist. Ah, to be Irish to be sure!!

I went down on the Pacific Highway and back on the New England Highway. Suddenly I am riveted by the thought of going down on a highway – one that I may come back to next time I write a stand up script. Anyway, it’s not as though either highway was new to me. I know them intimately, having travelled them often in my misspent youth, and less frequently in later years. What was unique about this trip was that I did them both of successive days. The phrase that springs to mind, to summarise the experience is “The Two Australias”. It’s a phrase that normally applies to the gap between the haves and the have nots. And anyone who gives it a nanosecond of thought realises that there are actually “many Australias”. Even in the (usually) socially and politically neutral topic of landscape, there are a lot more than two Australias. But in general, we readily recognise and relate to “the coast” and “the inland”. That’s what I’m getting at here. That’s the contrast that you get in no uncertain terms when you travel between two points approximately 800 kilometres apart by different highways: the Pacific Highway along the coast; and the New England Highway through the inland.

Now, before anyone gets up too big a head of steam scoffing at the notion that Tamworth, for example, really is the inland, let me say, true, it’s not Alice Springs or Jiggalong. But it is sheep country, and it is the Country Music Kapital of ze nonejuniverz. And it is in the most exquisitely subtle landscape. On the coast there is close settlement including villages every 10 minutes and big towns or small cities as you prefer, about an hour apart; and biggish rivers, especially in the Northern Rivers Region. There’s a lot of evidence of man-made landscape: orchards, cash crops, dairy farms – or once were dairy farms, with their decaying infrastructure; trees, such as figs and pines that are obviously not native, but have become so much part of our psychological landscape that it would not be Australia without them. Along the Pacific Highway, there is not a kilometre that has not been visibly shaped by human activity. And the most astounding thing about that is that it is actually quite pleasant to experience – mostly. The other important distinguishing characteristic of this landscape is that it is a coastal plain. It has its ups and downs, but in general, it offers very few long distance vistas. By contrast, the New England Highway traverses downlands whose modest ridges provide at every turn the kind of views that town dwellers pay premium prices for. There is very little human habitation to be seen between towns, very few exotic trees, very few crops, but there are, at times, large numbers of grazing animals, mainly sheep, but no where near as many as one might expect, probably because the properties are so vast, and their carrying capacity so small, that the animals are rarely near roads as they eat their way across their sparsely foddered domains. Another highly visible feature of the landscape, especially the further north you get, is granite boulders strewn ever so decorously across the paddocks. God, it seems, was, is and ever shall be, an exterior decorator – among other things. There is a modesty about the towns along the inland highway. They’ve barely left the nineteenth century. The twenty first century will very likely never venture their way – except in the form of highways between distant urban centres. What does it tell you when Macdonalds is on a bypass rather than in a town?

The most amazing thing about the New England Highway on this trip was the number of semi-trailers and B Doubles on it – or, rather, not on it. It used to be truckie territory until very recently when the Pacific Highway was opened up to unregulated road transport. On this trip I counted five (5) (sic, 5, five only!) big mothers. There were a slightly larger number of covered fixed tray trucks that would have to be there for local commerce, but in general, I had the road to myself most of the time. I need to say that I am in no way saying that I prefer one highway to the other. I truly appreciate what each has to offer and am grateful beyond my ability to express for the opportunity to se so much in so quickly.

Which raises the question, does one really actually see anything at all, covering so much territory in so little time. Wouldn’t it be better, for example to see the granite boulders at walking pace – as a real bullocky would? Well, it would certainly be good to see them at walking pace, but not necessarily better. And if we’re talking walking pace, we’re talking a very limited amount of landscape that can be taken in. Sure, it can be taken in greater detail, but there’s also a lot to be said for taking in the kind of bigger picture that driving two highways in two days affords.

The last four hours of the trip were a mistake I will not make again. I was at Glen Innes at 6:45 pm and should have stopped at a motel. Instead, I took the road down to Grafton. I’d done Tenterfield to Lismore several times since moving to Nirvana, and wanted to see a road I’d never been on. Well I saw less than half of it, because it was dark by 8:00 pm which meant that the best part – the descent from the big ridge – was illuminated only by headlights. I was in Grafton by 9:15 pm where I refueled and reMacdonaldsed for the final leg. It didn’t matter that it was at night. I could drive that part of the road with my eyes closed, I’ve done it so many times – never, I might add, with my eyes closed, but. Eh?

Aboriginal people would say that it is the landscape that provides one with identity. Another view of the world would say the human consciousness engages with the landscape and animates it. I’m not here to choose between the two. But I am here to say that the landscape and I sang to each other. I can’t claim to know what Aborigines mean when they talk about singing the landscape. But I know what I mean by it. It is now a week since I went to a singing night with the leader of my choir, and got up the next morning at 5:00 am to set off on what turned out to be an unbelievably intense experience. That intensity has not diminished one bit. The amazing thing is that I can now travel at the speed of thought from point to point on that journey – not in a linear succession, but through “worm holes” so that one moment I am marvelling at how beautiful Richmond is; then gasping at undulating rows of grassed hills; then counting the intersections in Sydney between key points on my exit route (printed off on Friday afternoon courtesy of the WhereiS website – whose address follows for anyone unaware of it
http://www.whereis.com/whereis/home.do;jsessionid=BE9C68770CA0B29DF0A8146BD4FEEC82.server2-1); then zooming across the Clarence River; then winding up the Bells Line of Road; then approaching the point at Hexam where there is a large yellow diamond shaped road sign with a black graphic consisting of a vertical line which branches at the top into two opposing acute angles that might be arms bent at the elbows were there a circle between them to represent a head, and in the absence of which could only, therefore, be legs bent at the knees. Maybe this was where I got the idea of going down on the highway. Just kiddin’ of course, but it was nevertheless the moment when it occurred to me that the trip would be all the more stimulating if I took the alternative route back home.

It really was an exciting moment. I had about 150 metres to decide. But, really, there was nothing to decide. The yellow diamond was its own meaning. Not merely a road sign indicating where the New England Highway digressed from the Pacific Highway, but a sign!! the like of which is not easily disregarded. As I entered the roundabout it was like approaching close enough to a heavenly body and using its gravity to effect a tangential slingshot. Rather than go right around I took the first exit and was on my way into the parallel universe, so to speak, of the inland. The trip had acquired an unexpected dimension. I knew vaguely the sequence of towns I would come to, but had no idea of the distances between them – unlike how it would have been had I returned along the Pacific Highway. I relaxed into a state of unknowing and said Let the future come. And it did – to an intoxicating cocktail of Vivaldi, performed by people I know; Teddy Tahu Rhodes, performed by Teddy Tahu Rhodes; and James Joyce, performed by who knows whom. Oh bliss the day!!

The artwork got home in several pieces, which is quite OK because it consisted of several pieces in the first place. A very slight amount of damage occurred on the way, but nothing that anyone would notice. Our cats greeted me with questions about where I’d been for the last two days. Well, they didn’t actually have to ask. I could see it in their faces. So I explained that Daddy had to do a little job for Daddy, and that I’d tell them more in the morning, after I’d emailed Penny that I’d arrived, had a shower and then a sleep. The next morning, however, it was as though nothing had happened. All they wanted was their daily portion of kangaroo meat. Cats can be so…. so….. wonder full.