Paying Ready Attention

Yellow flowers flutter in the light rain.  Green melons lie by the side of the road, bloated and misshapen.  Some of then are broken leaking a sticky looking flesh that seeps into the red soil.   Overnight rain has made the flood-ways run with water, stained as rich a red as the soil that does not hold it.  This combination of colours – yellow, green and red – becomes the whole landscape. We leave Kings Canyon and head south towards Uluru and its famous rocks.  The four beat swish of the windscreen wipers drops in and out of sync with the music on the radio.  In the floodway the water kicks away from the wheels of the cars and foams over the dry sections of road.  In the rear view mirror you can see it wash back onto the flooded section of the road.  Where the water meets the road, branches and leaves heap up in some counterfeit of a dam.   For a short while the tyres sing a sharp whistle as they shed the water drunk by their deep tread.   A brown falcon sits on a t

Kings Canyon - view from the steep hill Driving on dirt roads is like playing with a pet crocodile; eventually something is bound to go wrong.  Both are ticking clocks, waiting for you for you to blink, look the other way or be distracted in some way.  And when that time comes, bang, you get bitten.  This fact must be frankly terrifying for people barrelling along dirt roads with a birdwatcher at the wheel of the car.  Phones and sat nav systems pale into insignificance compared to a bird on a high treetop for these most distractible of drivers. “Yes officer, I know I drove off the road for no reason that you understand, but I thought I saw a pale morph goshawk.” After a few minutes I realise that the people in the car are much quieter than normal.   Thankfully the road is in pretty good condition, and some sections are being graded as we drive through.  The road grader, basically a desert snowplough, is flattening out the regular bumps – corrugations – that for