Epic Journeys I have undertaken: December 2008, To Cairns and back

Epic Journeys I have undertaken: December 2008, To Cairns and back

The journey started long before December. A couple of years ago, if fact. I decided back then that I would buy a ‘new’ – that is, minute hand … well ….. OK, a second hand…car when I could take a lump sum from superannuation without penalty. I would check out if Toyota Corollas are still the stayers they’ve always been, but the question was, who would know that? My niece’s husband in Cairns – which would make him my nephew in law, I suppose. Not because he’s in Cairns, but because … oh never mind. Part of the journey also included applying for the Service Pension (for war service) and a disability pension as well; and negotiating the conversion of my superannuation into an income stream. They are topics for another day, but it is important to know that they were part of the larger life journey of which the trip to Cairns was but part. It also involved disposing of the car I’d had since 1989 – a Toyota Corolla, of course, 1986 model. You might think the latter would be a very straight forward thing to do – especially if one was to just give the car away, as I did. How hard could it be. Here’s the keys. It’s yours. Well, no actually, although it could have been. Had I given it to a nephew living locally that’s all I would have had to do, but I gave it to a young woman who really needed a break – someone I’ve known for a few years and who’s been fending off bad luck with something like the patience of Job. The problem was that the car could be hard to start at times; the sun roof leaks (but only when it rains, which is fortunate, eh?); the bonnet needs a special procedure to open; and sometimes you can’t tell what’s wrong with it just by kicking the tyres. So I felt obliged to organise explanations and demonstrations, as well as brief her on insurance and registration. Anyway, the day came for the hand over. I did some last minute things before heading to Cairns by plane; and Natasha drove me to where the Airport Shuttle would pick me up, then drove the car away as its new owner. Fortunately, the bus was late, because some time later she returned and asked me how to tale the key out. That’s when I remembered to tell her never to turn the ignition off while the car is in motion – because the steering locks and you can’t change direction. Being a girl, it would probably never occur to her to try such a thing. But better safe than sorry.

The bus came, an hour late. I sat in the back seat and looked out at the details of the landscape I could never take in while driving. At one point I glanced at the other occupant of the seat. Unshaven (as distinct from bearded), wrap around sunglasses, seriously jaded in demeanour, and eyes fixed on infinity, or so it seemed. I felt a twinge of superiority. Generation Why, I grunted silently, they don’t know what from wherefore … and returned my attention to the scenery. It was so exquisite that I felt the old magic return – the feeling I had driving around when we first came down here – every moment a wonder; around every corner another jaw dropping view. This continued until just before the Tweed River, after which the views would be of civilisation, or the effects thereof. The reverie was broken by a tap on the shoulder. It was the ‘thug’ offering me his water bottle. No thanks. Sure? Yes, I’m fine, thank you. I returned to the last of the greenery, but quickly realised that I’d missed the point of what had just happened. Why would someone do that to a complete stranger? To make conversation, of course. So I turned back and asked, Where are you going? He was going to Sydney. I’m going to Cairns, I said. Oh, just been there, he said. And, it turned out, everywhere else. He was from Brighton, and the conversation was animated and lasted until I left the bus at the Jetstar terminal. So much for judging a back packer by his sunglasses.

Despite being an hour late, I still had a long wait for my plane. If you insist on the cheapest flight your departure will be scheduled at times like 6:00 am or 9:40 pm. As I was not going to have a car I had to catch either a train (from Robina) or a bus (locally) to the airport. The last train left Central for the airport at 7:29 pm and the last bus from Uncle Toms at 4:30 pm. I chose the bus so that Natasha would have less driving to get me to my pick up point. With no mobile phone on which the bus company could contact me to explain what was going on I just had to practice Zen patience. It could be a couple of hours late and still get me there on time – though other passengers might no be as unperturbed. And besides, how many people have you heard about who, for one reason or another, missed a plane that crashed? Maybe I was missing … well, never mind, The bus did come and I arrived at the airport with much time to kill – and then found out that I had even more than I’d expected: the plane was running late. An hour late.

I’d packed every unread copy of The Week and a couple of sections of the most recent Saturday edition of the SMH, but somehow, that didn’t seem to be enough to fend off the boredom of such a long wait for my plane, so I went to the newsagent/airport book store and asked about a book I’d heard about that very morning. It was an account of how the geopolitics of the world might change if the USA just vanished in an instant. The eyes of the bloke behind the counter widened in surprise, and then he pointed to the air and said, Walk this way. I think I may have what you are talking about. And there on the shelf was a book called The World Without Us. Both letters of the word Us should have been in upper case if it were referring the said superpower, but I didn’t notice and assumed it was indeed the book I was looking for. It turned out not to be. Rather it was about the world without humans. Interesting all the same. I didn’t try reading it from cover to cover. Rather I dipped into a chapter here, another there, and realised that I had heard of this book much earlier in the year. You may have heard yourself, on the ABC, that in a very short time (less time than we’ve been here, which in geological time is the blink of an eye) the only evidence remaining that we were here will be big holes in the ground. You know, open cut mines, whose walls are cut at less than the angle of repose, and therefore will not erode but fill up with water. And those that don’t fill up will be colonised by plants and animals and remain as giant terraces until processes that occur over geological time reshape the very crust of the earth itself. All other traces of our being here will have long been obliterated by water.

The book I was after, by the way, is Without Warning by John Birmingham who also wrote He died with a falafel in his hand – so he’s an Australian.

Anyway, I was allocated Seat 1A, which means I had miles of leg room as it is adjacent to the front entrance – and opposite the Hosties’ seats. I was meant to assist with evacuation if the situation arose, which I thought was a bit ironic, since I would be one of the first people in the plane to become one with everything should we slam head on into Mount Erebus or a tall building. But since we were not going anywhere near the Antarctic the former was fairly unlikely. The latter however … also unlikely, really. After all Kevin Rudd is now Prime Minister, and between him and that black Irishman in the USA – you know, O’Bama – all that is bad in the world will be made right. Which was a real comfort, because as we waited announcement after announcement apologised for delays and notified people of changes to flight numbers and departure gates, all of which was down to the need for unexpected aircraft maintenance. Not at all reassuring. Remember Ansett? And more recently the trouble Qantas has been having? We did eventually get off the ground and I decided that I would try to sleep. Fat chance. When we landed in Cairns, I was not only dog tired, but confronted by tropical humidity and heat. After what seemed like a walk around the airport equal to the distance from Brisbane, I eventually found myself on a footpath near a sign Passenger Pick Up. And in a very short time, there was my lift. It was about 3:00 am when I fell into bed – some time later I woke up without seeming to have gone to sleep.

I’d been picked up by Grahame, the said nephew in law, husband of Karen, father of Rachael, Matthew and Danielle – ages 7,8,&9 in reverse order. I’d taken three books as gifts I’d selected from the Mullumbimby book shop with the aid of a 10 year old boy I didn’t know. Only one of the kids was at home. The eldest had gone south for dental treatment, and the boy was with his grandmother so that I could have his room. The youngest was curious. After saying hello to Karen and having a cup of tea it was off to the car yard – via a number of Grahame’s other businesses, one of which was a boat yard in which he showed me a launch or cruiser that he had designed and built with his own hands. Think Aristotle Onassis and you’d only barely exaggerate the size and opulence of the craft I was looking at. Grahame offered me a look inside, but I said I’d wait until I could drink champagne on its bridge on launch day. You get the picture. The guy’s loaded. Yet you’d never know by looking at the way his family lives, or hearing him talk – even business on the phone. While the paperwork was being done for me to take possession of the car Grahame told me some remarkable stories about his operations. I asked him if he keeps a journal or a diary, because there was the making of a good book.

The moment came. We walked out into the yard, and there before me was what I can only describe as the Starship Enterprise. Ice Blue – an interesting colour – in sunlight it is the faintest blue. As the light changes it too changes form blue to silver to white to grey, and picks up tints of anything that comes near it – a bit of a chameleon, eh? Grahame showed me various aspects of its workings before I took the keys and very gingerly reversed it out of the yard. I hadn’t even crossed the footpath before I had to stop and ask someone how to close the windows. A two thousand kilometre adventure lay ahead. I still hadn’t come to grips with the fact that what I had control of actually belonged to me, so as I crept over the footpath onto the street, I heard in my mind’s ear, Captain Jean Luc Picard say, Ensign. Set a course for the Townsville sector; sub-luminal speed. Engage.

In spite of the Captain’s instructions the car attempted an immediate jump into hyperspace. Discovery No. 1: it has real grunt – a lesson I am still learning the subtleties of. The air conditioner was already going so in spite of the heat and humidity outside the car, it was like a luxury hotel room inside. It was – and still is – hard to believe. For most of the nineteen years that I had my previous car the aircon didn’t work. We had driven nearly half a million kilometres in it, in the tropics in summer and the Blue Mountains in winter, among other places, and broiled or froze as the season provided. The exterior and interior had gradually deteriorated, a condition which I addressed by having a reconditioned engine put in and a new paint job, as well as refurbishing the interior with lambs wool seat covers and other accoutrements. But for all my efforts, it was still really only mutton dressed up as lamb. In contrast the interior of my new craft almost gloats with opulence. Deep charcoal bucket seats enveloped the body like an intelligent or bionic prosthetic. You know, the kind of seat that makes you know you are one of the rulers of the universe. (just kidding) As I passed a large glass fronted building I caught a glimpse of its exterior. The most astounding sense of pride surged through every fibre of my being. That was my baby!! I had never before understood how guys could be in love with their cars. I do now.

It took some time to clear Cairns and its surrounding sub-luminal speed zones. Fortunately, I wasn’t in a hurry, because my docking facility in the Townsville sector would not be available until late afternoon, so I paid close attention to the changes that had occurred since my last visit – exactly a decade earlier. The place was a lot more trim – no gravel verges; verdant plant life in the median strips; and gleaming facades behind bowling green lawns with designer exotics. It was no longer a Cairns I could say I knew. It had been infiltrated and overtaken by aliens. In the eighties you could tell them by their white shoes. These days they are barely recognisable. They have adapted to the sartorial standards of the locals, who in turn have adopted the aliens’ 'aspirational values'.Seeing the new Cairns reminded me of the once new Port Douglas, and that, of course, reminded me of the graciously old Port Douglas, where I had the very great pleasure of eating fresh coral trout and washing it down with tequila in a dilapidated restaurant with fish nets and Cianti bottles hanging from the ceiling, situated on a jetty that should have been declared a hazard, but wasn’t because people in those daze didn’t expect to be cosseted – the days before Christopher Skase threw other people’s money around and turned the place into a manifestation of his soul – you know, two miles of imported fully grown date palms lining the southern approaches to the sepulchral behemoth ironically named the Port Douglas Mirage. The further out I got, the more familiar the place became - you know, kess change - until I was into the cane fields and the approach to Walsh’s Pyramid and Mount Bartle Frere – Queensland’s highest mountain, perpetually cloaked in a theophany of clouds. It was time for super-luminal velocity – well, for maximum permitted speed, anyway – maintained by cruise control.

Ah!! What bliss!! What is it about driving that transports one not merely from one state (Qld) to another (NSW), but from one state (preoccupation with minutia) to another (mindfulness)? Probably the fact that so few essential physical and mental functions are involved, allowing the rest of one’s being to engage with the universe, if I can put it that way. In what other circumstance can one give oneself to one’s fondest dreams with absolutely no sense that one might be wasting one’s time - that one should be doing something 'useful'? It may be a bit like making art, especially if one’s art involves using words, or concepts – which, dare I say it, would make one’s reveries conceptual art. Another way of describing it is that it may be like meditation. What starts out as a thought loses its form as the connections between it and all other thoughts bring it into communion with the Whole. One enters the void, in the sense that one goes beyond thought to being present. And that, of course, actually increases one’s safety, because being present means exactly what it says. One is utterly aware of one’s presence in a car on the road travelling at a speed that could kill if something went wrong. One is alert not only to the big picture (to change the metaphor from words to images) but to the details within it. And that’s how it is in any car, even without cruise control. With CC it’s even more liberating – although one person recently told me she doesn’t use CC because it makes her lose concentration. That has never been my experience. Some years ago when I worked in a job that involved using company cars to travel all around northern NSW, I discovered the joy of CC and vowed that my next car would have it. It was, one of the two things I told Grahame the car must have. Well actually, the other was something it was not to have, viz, a sun roof. So when it was appropriate on my journey back to Nirvana via Nirvana, I engaged the pilot’s little helper and noticed what an incredible difference it made – in at least two ways. Firstly, because I did not have to obsessively monitor my speed, I became aware of how much more alert I could be of what was going on around me. And secondly, I didn’t have to think about whether I was going too fast, running the risk of getting a speeding ticket. It’s not all plain sailing, however, with CC. I discovered that my beautiful craft has a mind of its own – well, a will of its own, anyway – when it in CC. When going up hills it has a tendency to jump into hyperspace – you know, drop a cog or two and gun it. And of course, when one is approaching sharp bends one has to take back control, otherwise one might find oneself spiralling towards a black hole. But in general, air conditioning, power steering, cruise control and a myriad other features I haven’t mentioned, made for one of the most blissful experiences of my driving life. Had we but world enough and time… two thousand kilometres in the embrace of my coy mistress seemed barely a blink. In one sense, I really was in hyperspace!

One circumstance that made the Cairns to Townsville leg of the journey particularly pleasurable was the density of traffic – or lack of it. I had forgotten that north of about Maryborough the number of cars one has to share the road with diminishes sharply, even around larger places like Cairns, Townsville, Mackay and Rockhampton. One can frequently see no other vehicles in the whole distance ahead and behind. This, of course can be enhanced by the use of CC, at least for vehicles ahead, by setting CC at slightly less than the speed of any vehicle ahead. It can mean that you are being overtaken by cars coming from behind, and one needs to consider pulling over momentarily if traffic is building up behind. But once again, this is precisely one of the joys of CC – it creates the mental space in which such strategies become possible.

Another thing I had forgotten about the Cairns to Townsville leg is the overwhelming evidence of the fact that one is driving in the tropics – well, the wet tropics, actually. From slightly south of Ingham to slightly north of Proserpine is the dry tropics. The difference between the two is cleverly illustrated by a nickname given to Townsville (probably by people from Cairns, in the first place, but now embraced by Townsvillains (sic) as a badge of honour), viz, Mount Isa by the Sea! Having grown up near Townsville and taken most of my school holidays near Mackay, which is much more lush than Townsville yet not classified as the wet tropics, I was always awed by verdant extravagance of the wet tropics when I drove to and from Cairns – in particular the rampant vines that covered the trees in vast areas of the landscape, transforming it into a wonderland of mystery, if that’s not overdoing it a bit – and even if it is… What! me care? So after the cane fields and mountains came the ‘uninhabited’ forests festooned with magical shapes that made me literally gasp with joy as I remembered my youth and realised that there was still something of the world I had known in tact. Were I a psalm singer I would doubtless have composed a song of praise to mark the occasion. Who knows, perhaps that is what I am doing now.

My next jolt was as I approached Ingham and saw the tribes of Rain Trees camped permanently on the plains. For those who have never been to North Queensland and probably don’t know what Rain Trees are, let me call to mind the saying that money doesn’t grow on trees. Nor, you might reasonable assert, does rain. And you’d be right, but only in the strictly literal sense that has become the norm in our less than poetic public imagination. These trees originate in Africa and are adapted to surviving predation by giraffes. So, as you have probably already envisaged, they have very tall trunks. But what you may not yet have imagined is the canopy that spreads at right angles to the trunk. The canopy casts a very dense shade and in summer attracts swarms of cicadas which, when pumping up their wings, excrete about half their body mass in water which falls like rain on anyone or anything that gathers in the shade beneath.

Then as I arrived on the edges of the town itself I was stricken joyfully, yet again, by the sight of Cassias and Poincianas, both of which grow in the Northern Rivers of NSW, but not with the vigour and splendour they attain up north. To start with both types of tree grow to fifty plus feet and enrobe themselves with flowers of such density and richness of colour that an unsuspecting pilgrim might think he’d witnessed a manifestation of that divinity which is said to take the form of angels in cultures sprung from the religions of the book. A knowing pilgrim, on the other hand, would have no trouble at all acknowledging that that is precisely what she was witnessing, and he would greet them with peals of emotion, which such beings would have no trouble recognising and relating to – unlike words which, though they would not fall on deaf ears, would not so fall only because such tree/angel/beings don’t have ears for words to fall on.

South of Ingham I entered the dry tropics as I approached Townsville and remembered something that I had been glad to forget. There are many Townsvilles. There are the vibrant artistic and academic cultures; a military culture; a particularly unimaginative and vindictive business culture; and there is the physical look of far too much of the place. You probably have to be an Aborigine, or on your way to becoming one, to love the comparative monotony and meagreness of the Dry Tropics. You probably have to be a particularly single minded white fella entrepreneur to feel no shame at the industrial ugliness that greets you as you arrive in Townsville from the north. This is what I had been glad to forget, and not at all thrilled to remember as I dropped out of warp speed to torture of seeing shabby sheds bulging with the makings of great material wealth, piled one beside the other for what seemed like an eternity. Many Townsvillains continue to wonder why their patch still has no international airport despite being self styled as the “Capital of North Queensland”. I will not attribute it to the smugness of the predominant merchant class, for Cairns could hardly be more virtuous in this regard. But surely the way a place looks manifests something about the way it is. I’m not suggesting that there is anything wrong with a culture of counting the profits; or denying the resilience and efficacy of the parallel universe that exists in the same landscape, honouring the prophets of sustainability. The Galleries, public and community based; Museum(s?); University and a multitude of Research Institutes; and possibly even some churches enable a huge proportion of the population to define and accomplish life choices that honour the landscape and all who live in it. Far from being sordid boiling down plant it started out as, it really is a good place to live – a place in which the grubby business of grubby business can be kept at arms length if not in its place. I’m simply saying that I have very mixed feelings about the town I grew up near and later came to maturity in.

I docked the Enterprise (an ironic name, given what I have just said about the culture of enterprise) in Mundingburra, the centre of one of Queensland’s most sordid political scandals – of recent times, at any rate - a labor pokitician went to gaol over it. Friends who have seen much more of the world than I live there. That is, when they’re not dropping in on the world’s really serious trouble spots, like Lagos and Srebrenitza. We talked, drank wine, had dinner – half of an Atlantic Salmon….each! (not actually, but so it seemed) and panicked about their not being ready to fly to Melbourne at 8:00 the next morning. Being the seasoned problem solvers that they are, they managed well enough and after dropping them at the airport, I returned to their house on the edge of a park populated by a very large number of Rain Trees… and other things. For two daze I caught up with blasts from the past – not all of them, regrettably – I learned long ago that trying to catch up with everyone results in your not really enjoying any of it. If you’re reading this and I didn’t contact you, it’s not you, it’s me. And that’s the truth. While I was there I was taken to the new riverama. That’s not what it’s called, but it describes the way Townsville has finally discovered that a river runs through it – to coin a phrase. The focal point is a large cultural and sports centre with a terrace of pools that cover about a trillion acres falling gradually to river level. And along the river on both sides walking/cycling tracks that run from the ocean to the Ross River Dam. In between, in waterways created by a series of weirs, there are places for water sports of all kinds, from swimming and rowing to power boating and skiing. It really is very impressive. The other significant thing that I did while I was there was go to look at the houses we used to own. Much had changed in the street. No more shabby leftovers from the era when renovating meant tacking fibro on the outside and inside of walls. Some places were all but unrecognisable. Our former rental house, however, was looking a bit sad, but the house we lived in looked hideous. It had been painted in colours calculated to prevent anyone from seeing what we had achieved by rescuing a dump that others offered to burn down and turning it into a heritage listed property. The garden canopy that John had nurtured is gone, along with the most spectacular variegated Pandanus trees. I went to see it against my better judgment. Never again, but. Eh?

Before leaving I tried unsuccessfully, to buy a hail cover for the new car. The south east of Queensland had been repeatedly clobbered over recent weeks and I was anxious to do anything I could to protect my treasure. Apparently it doesn’t hail in the north so there was no protection to be had. I was more successful, however, in getting some entertainment on CD, Volumes 1 & 2 of The Canterbury Tails, from the Mary Who Bookshop for the rest of the trip. And while I was there, one of the people I visited found the book I tried to buy at the airport, so I got that too.

At first light the next day I carefully checked doors and windows, hung the key where it was supposed to go and pulled the door and gate locked behind me as I left. I mention this because the next night after arriving home, I rang my hosts, then in Melbourne, only to find out that that their house had been broken into sometime after I left…. by a person or persons who shares the park with the Rain Trees. That brought me down from a high of such clarity that were I still a good Catholic boy, I would probably feel obliged to regard it as a mortal sin. But I am getting ahead of myself. I steered my magic carpet at snail’s pace towards the Southern gateway of Townsville boggling at the manicured boxes of ticky-tacky occupying once vacant grasslands where cattle grazed awaiting slaughter in the meatworks that is now probably a suite of specialty cosmetic shops, until I saw one of those twenty four hour service centres that dot the Queensland highroads – in strong contrast to the locally owned and operated petrol stations that keep local hours in NSW. Sometimes one is grateful for ‘progress’ especially when one can get espresso at 5:00 in the morning. Craving for caffeine adequately assuaged, I set off for Rockhampton where I would dock for the night. If I don’t describe the landscape through which I travelled, it is not just because it is hard to find words to make it sound enticing, but because I hardly noticed it at all, so preoccupied was I with the on-board entertainment.

The Canterbury Tales is something I was supposed to have read in my first year at University. But along with most of the prescribed Shakespearian plays, which I had read in Classic Comic format as a child, I consigned TCT to the too hard basket. I heard extracts recited in Middle English at a Medieval Night at our Restaurant many years later and realised that I had missed out on something rather special. So when I saw the discs in the MHB I jumped at the opportunity to right the unrightable wrong. Woeful sorry would I have been upon later discovering the amusement I would have foregone had I not grasped the opportunity in both hands and somewhat emptied pockets. Sore lacking is my skill to relate in more than passing anecdote the mirth that shaped my mouth and face full twenty gross furlongs more as I rode. Such company none has cherished since the very things were done as told in the tails of such forthright companions as the Knight, the Miller, the Pardoner, the Merchant, the Franklin, the Wife of Bath, the Clerk, the Reeve and the Nun’s Priest. And if I try to keep this up any longer I may find myself in a rap session with an uncomprehending audience – which I may already have.

In Rockhampton I stayed with the partner of the friend whose funeral I recently reported. She looked much more relaxed than she did last time I saw her. I was pretty spaced out by the time I got there so there was not a lot of conversation that would have made any sense. Inge prepared a very tasty dinner, shortly after which I crashed. I was off again at first light before Inge was up. As she lives on the north side I travelled right through the whole town – though not the CBD which, like most places these days, is by-passed.

Have you heard about the search for the lost tribes of Israel? Well I reckon at least one of them lives in Rockhampton. If you’ve never been to Rocky, you may not know that Bulls Rule. At several places along the highway as it runs through the town area there are very large sculptures of Bulls – 2 to 3 times life size (photo 1 in the set accessed by link below). There in quite a few other places as well, especially on the awnings of shops – offering some sort of protection, perhaps? So what has this got to do with lost tribes of any kind, let alone of Israel? Well, recall that one day when Moses was on holidays, mountaineering on the Sinai Peninsular, his brother sculpted a Bull Calf of gold (photo 2). Moses wasn’t happy when he saw it, but in spite of chucking a wobbley, many of his groupies, who spent the next four decades shuffling around after him in the desert, retained their affection for Bulls. I believe, on good authority, that some of them moved to Rockhampton while they were crossing the Red Sea – a feat that can be accounted for if one believes in worm holes. It would have been a simple matter for some people to take a wrong turn and end up in Rockhampton in the nineteenth century AD instead of Sinai in the thirteenth century BC. The problem with the Rockhampton Bulls, however, is that they have forgotten how to capture the real Bullness of Bulls - that's if they ever knew. So one day I’ll go back and offer to build three new Bulls at the town gates – one Mesopotamian (photo 3); another Minoan (photo 4); and the third a Minotaur (photo 5 ii); as well as in the RSL (photo 5 i), the Council Chambers (photo 5 iii) and the City Park (photo 5 iv); and yet another, a mural, perhaps in the Civic Theatre, of one of the Palaeolithic cave paintings (photo 6 i). That’d giv’em sumfin t’finka bout. Wu’nit?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/twogreytoes/sets/72157611872426083/detail/
See why I luuuuuuuurv driving?

Since what lies south of Rockhampton – until you cross the border - has even less to recommend itself to a curious eye than what lies to its north, I shall say no more, but bring the account of my journey, which continued for another full day, under the intoxicating influence of Geoffrey Chaucer’s wit, to an end, saying only that the addition of what might be considered a distraction to goal of maintaining one’s sense of being one with everything (sounds like a hamburger, doesn't it), in no way diminished the connection I had established earlier with all that I traversed, but, on the contrary, added a previously unexperienced dimension to my ever widening sense of the epic nature of life as a journey, and journey as metaphor.

(You can laugh now at or with me as you see fit.)

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.

Driving with children

On I Spy, Buzz and Prime Numbers
One of John’s nieces with her husband and three kids – eldest starting high school in 2008 – stayed with us for four days from Boxing day. A good time was had by all, going fishing, making things out of clay, eating, more eating, and finding – perhaps making – room for even more food. We did a bit of driving – a trip to Nimbin; another to the Cold Roast (Gold Coast for those no up on your Strine) with the kids swapping cars as we went. The favourite game was I Spy With My Little Eye.

It occurred me after a while that it’s a game that adults would benefit from – and about which someone could almost certainly write a thesis. I won’t go into too much detail here, but how often have you heard jaded grown ups complain about the boring car trip they had just done? That would be because they didn’t pay attention, wanting to be somewhere else, perhaps – the destination rather than the journey. Imagine the most featureless scene you have ever… well, seen… There’s always more there than immediately “meets the eye”. Actually, if something’s there, it meets the eye, given 20/20 vision, but it may not get your attention. So I Spy played in what would normally be thought of as a boring and unstimulating place will generate attention to details not normally noticed. It may even give rise to the need to name phenomena previously unknown to one or more of the players. The special challenge when driving is that one has to choose categories of objects that can be seen, while moving, for at least as long as it takes players to answer correctly or give in. The kids did this without even being aware of it – until, that is, one of them nominated something that was not observable once we had gone past it, and one of the others articulated the rule that had been implicit until that point. If I were to say to you that everything we do/know is theory-laden your eyes would probably glaze over. But I just gave you an example of what I would be talking about, were I talking about it – which I am. The kids recognised that the rules that applied in static situations would not work in dynamic situations and adopted a new set of behaviours to deal with the changed situation; and only when it became necessary, clarified the way the rules had changed. Now imagine trying to explain that to them. It can be done, but not while they’re playing the game.

Now imagine a society in which I Spy With My Little Eye is not just a game but the sacred ritual that mediates their sense of who they are, and must be played five times a day at precise times. This society existed long before there were trains cars and aeroplanes, and developed their ritual in a world that was virtually static; and concealed the fact that they developed the ritual by telling themselves – and coming to believe – that the ritual was written on a stone tablet that was lowered from heaven on a golden rope. In time their neighbours begin to travel in trains, cars and aeroplanes. But because an object cannot be seen once they have passed it, they find they cannot perform their ritual. Well, they can if they travel in cars, because they can stop while they do their thing. But trains and planes won’t stop for them, and anyway, what’s there to see at 30,000 metres, and when the train, plane and even the car takes them beyond the landscape they know to landscapes they have never seen before, and therefore cannot name, how could they play their game? What would they do? Refuse to travel in trains and planes to far away places, and travel by car only within the landscape they know? Or change the ritual? Maybe even abandon ritual altogether for want of the theory that ritual is context dependent – indeed condemning as “Modernism” such a theory when it arose. See what I mean about the potential for a thesis. And all because I overheard kids playing a game.
At the risk of frightening you to death, I want to tell you about another game that I don’t think they understood at all. It is called Buzz. One person says a number – it can be either odd or even. The other person says Buzz. The first person says another number, but if the first number was odd, the second has to be odd. If it is not, the other person has a turn. On this set of rules, the result is that someone who knows the difference between odd and even numbers and can count to 100 gets to say every odd or even number between 0 and 100 and stays in for the whole time. Boring. No one played by that set of rules for long. Which set me thinking. They must have misunderstood the rules. It would be so simple to modify them. Succeeding numbers had to be the opposite of the numbers that preceded them, for example. I say an odd number, my partner says buzz, and I must then say an even number, otherwise it is my partner’s turn. But even that can’t have been the intent of the game. What could it be? I had an idea. Maybe it was a game about Prime Numbers. So I asked the Tatum, who had just finished grade one, how many twos in four. Two, she said. How many twos in two? One. OK, I thought, she knows about division. So I said, tell me a number that can be divided with nothing left over by itself or one. What? the problem was the word divided. She knew how to do it but not how to name it. And what about “with nothing left over”? Well, I said, how many threes in eight? More than two but not three. Yes, two with something left over. Oh, yeah. OK, now tell me an number that can be divided by itself or one with nothing left over. Long pause. They all can, she said. Another long pause as I pondered what had gone wrong. I was trying to steer her towards the concept of prime numbers and was facing the prospect of all numbers being prime numbers if I didn’t refine the rules of the game. Yes, I said. Now tell me a number that can be divided only by itself or one with nothing left over. Four, she said. No. there’s nothing left over when you divide four by one and by four. But how many twos in four? Two, she said. And nothing left over, I prompted. Oh yeah. What about five? Yes. Give me another one. Not six, she said. Why? Because there are three twos in six. Correct. Another. Seven. Yes, another. Not eight. Correct. Nine she said triumphantly. There’s four twos in nine with one left over. Ah, I said, but how many threes in nine? Three, she shot back. Oh! And nothing left over. Yes. Now do you see how it works? I want numbers that can only be divided by one or themselves with nothing left over. So now we have a new set of rules for the game Buzz. I say a number and you buzz me. My next number must be one that can only be divided by itself or one with nothing left over. Long pause. Say that again. OK but before I do, lets give the numbers we’re talking about a name. What will we call them? Long pause. I don’t know, don’t they already have a name? Well, yes, actually, they do. What is it then? They’re Prime Numbers. Can we play I Spy With My Little Eye Again? We never did get to play Buzz with prime numbers. Oh, and by the way, later on I thought that maybe there are various stages to the game. First you just get odd or even numbers sorted; then deal with both; and then with primes.